


Beware the Manor House

by SuedeScripture



Category: Actor RPF, Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-10-31
Updated: 2012-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:53:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuedeScripture/pseuds/SuedeScripture
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession. A ghost story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of, but not really, a death fic. Suffice it to say, major characters are no longer living and as such, are in fact dead. But in the spirit of whodunnit and AU, it really doesn’t matter much. M’kay? Just trust me. Props and apologies to the totally awesome guys at TAPS. Also, this first chapter implies this story might be funny. Don't count on that.

Billy jolted awake and squinted against the blinding light streaming in from the tiny flat’s window. Clearly, whoever designed the place forty years ago had taken careful measurements and consulted star charts to make absolutely certain that the sun’s most direct rays would hit this flat’s two by two foot square window and form a laser precisely in the only spot where a settee would fit at 7:24 AM exactly. Thankfully this was England, and such a beam couldn’t manage to get hot enough to singe off anything vital.

Groaning, he pinched the bridge of his nose, but it did nothing to alleviate the throb of the headache that settled in as soon as he was conscious. The shrill sound that woke him continued repetitively, until he stumbled off the sofa and over a pile of laundry to grab for his mobile.

“Aye, h’lo?”

“BOYD! MR. BOYD?”

“Ah, yes, this is—"

“MR. BOYD, HE’S COME BACK, AND HE’S TERRIFYING MY CATS, AND YOU TOLD ME HE’D GONE—"

“Missus… ah, Mrs. Cranston, is it?”

“MY SNOOKUMS IS BESIDE ‘IMSELF, AND—"

Billy held the phone quite away from his ear and winced. “Mrs. Cranston, I’ve told you—"

“IT’S MY FRANK, I TELL YOU. HE HATED THE CATS ALL OUR LIVES, THE OLD BASTARD, WHY I EVER MARRIED THE SONOFABITCH I DON’T KNOW—"

“MRS. CRANSTON!” Billy wasn’t in the practice of bellowing at clients, but if they yelled at him as much as this old deaf bat did, it really was only fair. With a whimper, she finally quieted. “Now, what’s your trouble, m’um?”

“T-the… the b-banging!” she blubbered, albeit quieter, “He’s gone banging ‘round again, always when I’m in the kitchen making breakfast or lunch or tea or supper for the kitties, and dammit, I thought you said HE’D MOVED ON—"

“Ms. Cranston,” Billy interrupted very calmly, massaging the pain in his forehead, “I’ve told you, the banging happens when you turn on the taps, yes? It’s only the pipes, m’um, I’m quite certain your late husband has left you and your cats well enough alone. Now, all you need do is hire a plumber in to work on your pipes. I believe I did offer my own services, but–”

“You did, Mr. Boyd, and you are too bloody expensive for an old woman like me with twelve starving cats to feed, and anyway, I’ve got no leaks, so I don’t see as why I need a plumber in the first place,” the old woman’s tone had gone quite snooty, “It’s the soul of my old departed Frank you’re meant to help me with…”

Billy rolled his eyes, but that proved painful. Not quite as painful as what he was willing to do to get fucking shot of her and ‘Frank’ and her twelve bloody cats, which were, in fact, not starving at all. “Ms. Cranston, I would be delighted to offer you my personal plumbing services at… at half rate.”

She hesitated, as if thinking this over. “Half rate, did you say?” Or perhaps that’s what she’d been playing at all along, the old cunt.

“Aye.”

“Well, that’s all right then, I suppose, if you want to starve me out of house and home. I’ve only got my cats, you know. I’ve not got that much time left for this world without you people robbing my pocketbook for every pence and bit…”

 _Yes, well, that would solve everyone’s problems now, wouldn’t it?_ Billy bit down on his desire to snap the old woman’s head off as he made arrangements to come fix her plumbing within an hour and starve _himself_ in the process.

Ringing off, he found and kicked the empty whiskey bottle he’d sucked down the previous evening. Served him right, drinking cheap and awful scotch that he’d wake with a cheap and awful hangover. The ‘Past Due’ notices still piled up on his coffee table. It would only be a matter of time at this rate before he’d show up on Maggie’s doorstep looking pitiful.

He maneuvered his way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee and swallow a painkiller before lumbering off to take a shower. It was bad enough dealing with Ms. Cranston and Snookums sober. Combined with a hangover, she might well become a ghost herself.

  
*

  
Bill was on his back beneath Mrs. Cranston’s positively ancient kitchen sink with a giant cat sitting on his chest, scrutinizing his every move with lurid green eyes and a look that said something akin to ‘soon’.

Not to say he didn’t like cats, but he wasn’t overly fond of twelve of them in various states of grouchy and decrepit, not unlike their owner and this old rotting Tudor. It stank with a lovely mixture of choking lavender perfume, cat piss and corned beef, and he’d do better to replumb the whole damned place from scratch than deal with these crusty, brittle pipes. Come to think of it, he could really just surreptitiously drop a match…

From his pocket, his phone went off, ringing and vibrating and… “MROAOAAAAAARR!!”

Snookums dug each and every one of its claws into him. Sitting up to peel the fucking beast off, he thwacked his head hard against the cabinet, and the headache resumed, as fierce as it ever had been. “FUCK!”

“WHAT’S THAT?” Ms. Cranston called from the sitting room.

“NO– _fuck!_ … NOTHING, M’UM! RIGHT AS RAIN IN HERE!” He yelled back, clutching his stinging chest and digging out the phone from his pocket. “Just as soon as I twist the head off that fucking cunting arsing… Hullo, Boyd’s Plumbing.”

“It will heal,” said a slow voice.

“It will… what?”

“Your flesh. It will heal. Your heart may not.”

Billy blinked, unzipping his coveralls and tugging up his t-shirt to assess the damage while he placed that voice. “Cate, this really isn’t the greatest time—"

“Beware the manor house,” she said, her voice still the low, utterly certain tone.

Billy lightly touched the hot bump forming on his forehead, noting that it actually had a straight divot in it from the wood, and sighed heavily, “I’ve no idea what you mean, Cate. Haven’t I asked you to leave me out of your business and I’ll stay out of yours?”

“This is business we may yet share, Billy. It’s only polite to warn you now.”

“Warn me of what?” Billy was becoming exasperated with this entire day, and perhaps the rest of the week for good measure, since it hadn’t been a good one in the least. “Another bill I can’t pay? An eviction notice, maybe? Enlighten me, O Clairvoyant One.”

“Temptation, in many forms. Fear, betrayal, anger. That’s all I can see for now. Beware the manor house,” she answered cryptically, before her voice took on the more musical lilt of her normal speech. “And don’t make fun, Bill. We’re both professionals here.”

“Right. Any particular manor house you wanted to specify? We’ve got a fair few of those round here, I hear tell.” Billy sniped irritably, but the line had already cut out.

The white and brown cat stared at him from behind a moldy cabinet, its ears flattened and eyes huge, growling low from its throat.

“Fuck off, you,” he muttered quietly, brandishing a wrench in front of himself like a sword.

The phone rang again before he’d ducked back under the sink. The cat hissed and Billy curled into a defensive ball, but it had streaked out of the room through a cat-flap in the kitchen door about four times smaller than the cat itself.

“Boyd’s Plumbing.”

There was silence, and then… “I’m sorry, I must have a wrong number.”

“Well, in that case, Boyd’s Paranormal Investigation.”

“Oh… oh.” The man on the line sounded upper class, and nervous. “Then this is… Is this…?”

“Boyd’s Paranormal, yes. It’s a, ah…moonlighting sort of a thing. Literally.”

“You can, er. You can get rid of a… a ghost, then?”

“That’ll depend on if you have a ghost, Sir. But in most cases, these things can be explained scientifically. Sometimes it’s naught but your plumbing, and I’m your man there as well. What’s your trouble?”

There was a sigh down the line. “I… I have a problem.”

“What are you experiencing?” Billy asked patiently.

“Everything. It’s thrown things round the rooms, moved furniture, it’s spoken in my ear, I’ve seen it—"

“You’ve seen it?” Billy interrupted, “Like a shadow, or something that repeats, like a video recording?”

“No, I’ve _seen_ it. Coming at me. I’ve felt it. The whole room goes cold as ice. It’s a man. It was a man. The eyes almost glow, and it shakes the beds, and slams doors… I’m at my wit’s end, Mr. Boyd. My wife is terrified, she won’t go near the place.”

“Of course,” Billy agreed, licking his lips. “I’ll, uh… what I’ll do is set up an initial visit so you can show me around, show me the places of high activity so I can take some readings—"

“It’s _everywhere_. I don’t think you understand, Mr. Boyd. I don’t think I have a ghost, I _know_ I do. And I’m not a man that buys into this… this _paranormal_ codswallop. ”

“Ah,” Billy paused. “I’m sorry, your name is…?”

“Ian Holm, Mr. Boyd. And I would… I’d appreciate a certain amount of discretion on your part about this matter.”

Billy gulped. Ian Holm, once a prominent and outspoken member of the London Assembly, a self-made millionaire and a politician that was either unlikeable or detestable depending on who you talked to. Billy had seen him on the telly occasionally, though he had to admit he paid little attention to politics. “Oh… right. Certainly, Sir. Where… uh, what part of London is this…?”

“Ho, no-no… Not in London, of course,” the man answered, “This is near Milton Keynes. Old place, long before that rot came in.”

Billy wrinkled his nose. “I see. That’s a wee drive, I suppose. Most of my business is here in London though. Plumbing business is a bit more lucrative, as it were.”

“I bought that place for a peaceful retirement and it’s been nothing of the sort. We had cleaners in, and they were fine for the first day or so, but then they run off and left my wife and I to finish and it…” the man halted and changed tact, “I’m willing to pay you whatever it takes, Mr. Boyd."

"Mr. Holm, Sir, I'm merely an investigator… ah, a debunker, really. There are ways of getting a ghost to move on, I suppose, but I've never…"

"I don't think you heard me properly, Mr. Boyd. I will pay you whatever it takes. Your expenses, your petrol and then some. I need someone to get rid of this thing. For good. I’ve already had a bloody priest in, and he came out ten minutes later telling me to phone the bloody Vatican. I’m not even a religious man. This is… it’s ludicrous.”

The cat poked its head through the cat-flap, its eyes glowing with an eerie yellow light.

“I understand,” Billy answered mechanically, eying the cat, “When… erm, when shall I start?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.

Billy urged the van up the gravel drive through the manor grounds. It was long overgrown and ill-kept, but one could see that at some point the straight growths of hedgerows had been tended, gardens full of weeds had once been perfectly geometrical and filled with color, and the wrought iron had not been rusting through and collapsing under its own weight.

The dark shape of Mr. Holm stood by his sleek black sedan in the circular drive before the house, standing with the back of his long coat to the wind and smoking a cigarette. The afternoon was crisp and foggy, the grey of the overcast sky only blending with the grey of the unkempt wintry landscape, paint that had chipped and worn to dull neutrality as the rest of the grounds fading into the fog. It had the creepy air of being a smudge of a world in the middle of a vacuum of space.

Billy pulled his thin windbreaker closer around himself and stepped out of the van, greeting the man with a nod and a handshake. Mr. Holm tucked his cold hand back in his coat pocket and looked Billy over intensely, almost piteously.

"So you're a… paranormal investigator, are you?"

"I'm a plumber, sir," Billy shrugged. "But if I can help you sort out your problem here, I will."

"You believe in this sort of thing?"

Billy met the man's eyes levelly. "No one believes until they've experienced something. Most don't want to, even afterwards. And the other eighty percent have a plumbing problem and an active imagination," He smiled, "I can fix that as well."

"I bloody well hope so, the money I put down on this place." Mr. Holm finished his black-papered fag, crushed it between the gravel and the toe of his shoe, and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. "Those are the keys to the front door, kitchen, and the coach house. I don't care whether you stay here or at a hotel. I don't think there's much in the cupboards, though."

Billy accepted the keys uncertainly. "Erm… Normally, sir, I'd just have you show me round, and I'll spend a night or two…"

But Mr. Holm had withdrawn his wallet, and was now counting out several large notes, which he pushed into Billy's gesturing hand. "That's two thousand pounds. Should cover whatever food you want, petrol, lodging in town. If you can be rid of that thing in two weeks, I'll give you another four."

Billy blinked several times at the cash in his chilly fingers. "Four… thousand?"

"Six thousand total, yes." The old man nodded and began to turn back to his car. "You have my number, Mr. Boyd."

"Erm, sir?" Billy called back, "Aren't you going to show me round the place?"

Mr. Holm gawked at him, at the house and back incredulously. "I'm not going in there."

As he settled into the back seat of the car, the front window slid down, and the driver’s gnarled hand gestured him to come closer, and closer still, until Billy leaned his head nearly into the window.

“Don’t go in the coach house,” the elderly man wheezed. His voice was an old Yorkshire burr, rheumy and wet.

Billy looked at the old building set away from the house, before a fierce grip to his jacket yanked him back, and the man’s sickly breath wafted across his face. His eyes had a quality to them Billy had never seen, a complete and utter terror behind a plea. “ _Don’t go in there_.”

With that he was let go, stumbling back and gasping the crisp, damp air, and the sedan spun its wheels on the gravel in its haste to get away, leaving behind a very confused plumber with a wad of cash in his fist.

This wasn't how it was properly done, after all. Typically, Billy would set up for a night or two, sweep the house, run the cameras, try for some electronic voice recordings. He'd do a bit of research, and present his findings. Most often, there was nothing but some faulty electrics, the house creaking on its foundation or air in the pipes, cobwebs, reflections from cars casting weird shadows, or if he was really lucky, the spirit of a dead relative just trying to come through and say hello.

He looked up at the decaying house, it's old stonework covered in moss and ivy, the windows dark. He wondered how often this property had changed hands and how long it had lain dormant. Because of a ghost? With property like this in such demand outside of a city like Milton Keynes and its surrounding burbs, it seemed odd that it would simply sit without a historical society attempting to restore it, turn it into an inn, or failing all that, avoid being bulldozed altogether to make way for a new row of housing.

The front door lock was sticky, and he had to fuss with it for some minutes before it swung open to a long hall with a staircase leading to the upper floor, and many rooms beyond.

The place was spacious and well appointed to Billy’s eye, but modest compared to many of the old estates that dotted England's countryside. It seemed much more of a large country house than a mansion. Mr. Holm must have had the electric company out, as the first light switch he found worked, an early twentieth century addition by the look of the old push button style switches. To his left he found an archway leading to a parlor, with wing back chairs and a settee arranged around a fireplace. To the right was a study filled to brimming with old books and walnut trappings, a music room that housed more chairs and a dusty grand piano, a spacious dining room, and beyond that the kitchens which looked to have been updated with mid-century appliances. Some rooms looked at least partially cleaned, but others were filled with dust and cobwebs. It wasn't uncommon for hauntings to start up heavily when their surroundings had been disturbed, especially if the house had sat destitute for years before. If this was a haunting at all.

As he rounded the quarter turn of the staircase to the upper level, his skepticism on that point took a swift hairpin turn. The air pressed against him as though gravity had increased, and felt several degrees warmer. _Heat rises_ he remembered, as he walked forward along the landing.

Several things happened at once. As he hit the switch to light the upper hall, a tremendous electric sizzle and pop issued from the dim ceiling lamp above. A door down the hall slammed hard enough to shake the walls, dust falling in sheets to the carpet. Footsteps moved toward him, fast, heavy and intent. He saw, just before he gasped, the smoky image of a horrible face in the rising dust, teeth and cold darkness of eye sockets directly in front of his own before it vanished as if imagined. He felt a force against his chest, ears ringing with an odd electric hum that grew sinisterly louder. The lamp threw sparks and Billy wildly feared the house would set afire right on top of him.

Then as suddenly as it began, it all stopped. The air rushed back into the space with a sound like an exhaled breath, and the overhead light slowly settled and brightened to a tame, normal light. Billy breathed slowly, willing his adrenaline to pass. His eyes searched the hall for some sign of trick or movement, but saw nothing but peeling wallpaper and dark doorframes. His breath hung in the air, cold enough to have dropped by twenty degrees or more in the space of a minute.

"All right, then," he murmured to himself. He'd foolishly not brought any of his equipment in, no way to have recorded this. Truthfully, Billy had never had an immediate personal experience quite so strong before and he left him unnerved. Not afraid, just merely surprised.

The second door on the right of the hall squeaked on its hinges. It opened inward, so he could not see if it was manipulated by a draft or a tricky hand. "All right, then," he repeated, and purposely walked towards it.

He'd very nearly reached the frame of the door when it slammed shut as hard as before, a whoosh of air and dust hitting him full in the face. Again, the light above his head shuddered and the voltaic hum rose to a nerve-wracking level.

" _Get out._ "

Billy spun at the low sound of the voice, and as he did, an unseen force hit him hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs and send him sprawling forward on the dusty carpet.

He coughed hard and hauled himself halfway up to his knees, looking around for the source of the assault, and with no warning, pain ripped through his back like a fire.

"Fuck!" he cried, watching the light slowly work itself back once again. He tried to clutch at the pain, catch it and see it, but it was no use. There was no one there.

" _Get out,_ is it?" he repeated back sarcastically. "Why is it always _get out_ with you lot?" He eyed the walls accusingly as he picked himself up and went back down the stairs unheeded, to the mirror he'd seen above the mantelpiece in the parlor. Yanking his jumper and t-shirt off over his head to the chill, stale air of the house, he turned to look at his reflection over his shoulder.

Over the wings of his shoulder blades, eight scratches had been drawn, four to a side like a symmetrical brand, the skin broken just enough to rise and burn as angry red welts standing out from his pale, sunless skin. Scratches from human fingernails, only there was no other human here but him.

"Jesus," he muttered at the sting as he twisted this way and that to see. It was not fear that rose in him now, but anger. He'd never been physically attacked by any spirit before.

From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a shadow move in the parlor's arching doorway in the mirror, but when he spun around to confront it, it had gone.

Billy huffed bitterly, pulling his clothes back on, wincing at the friction of cloth on the welts.

“Think you'll be rid of me that easily, eh?" He called out loudly to the house at large. "First mistake, friend. I'm not afeart of you."

He could feel the prickle of being watched, every hair standing up on his neck and arms, but nothing happened to acknowledge his words.

Outside, he collected several camera cases and extension cords from his van. A slam issued from the house as he gathered up his gear, and not surprisingly, he found the front door had not only been shut when he'd left it ajar, it had deadbolted itself once again as well.

"Good try, mate," he chuckled, "Bully for you I have the keys."

Another short fight with the lock and he dropped the lot on the parlor rug. The twilight outside was falling quickly, and he clicked on the lights in the entry to find an outlet.

The light promptly switched off as soon as he stepped away from it.

Billy sighed, returned and switched it back on. "Don't, yeah? I've a torch anyhow. And batteries. And I know how it works. You'll need energy to draw from if you want to keep fighting with me, won't you?"

He stepped away from the switch and watched it. It flicked off, the cracked rubber button depressing right before his eyes, and back on before he could move.

Billy smiled. "That's better, isn't it? We have an agreement, then."

He got to work setting up a camera in the parlor and another aimed down the main hall. After a moment, he took the third in hand and began climbing the stairs. On cue, the heaviness pressed against him and the same door in the upstairs hall slammed.

As he continued his assent, the door opened and slammed three more times, hard enough that he could feel the shudder through the walls and see more dust fall from the crown molding on the ceiling. The light began its telltale hum. He stopped on the top step, leaned casually against the wall to watch.

Eventually the onslaught stopped, and Billy smirked. "You're really quite taken with yourself, aren't you? All this effort and it’s not scaring me one bit. You’re going to wear yourself out."

He heard an all too human sounding hiss and the footsteps again, this time slower as they approached. The lamp continued to flicker.

"Look, mate, I get it," he rolled his eyes theatrically, trying to sound as put off as possible, "It's your house. You're well and truly fucked off that people are in here. Now, I'm not going to go down this hall and into your rooms, not yet. I'm just going to set up my camera here at the top of the stairs, so I can see what you're up to when I'm away. You can play all you want for this little machine here, show me all the scary tricks you know, and I'll see, all right?"

The thickness withdrew slightly, and Billy climbed the rest of the way to set the camera as promised, on the floor beside the baseboard pointing with a view down the hall. All the while, he could feel his actions closely scrutinized.

"Thing is, friend,” He spoke as he went back down the stairs, “You're as curious about me as I am of you. Am I right? How long has it been since anyone spoke to you directly, acknowledged you're really here?"

With a whoosh like a breeze, something small and heavy flew off the small sideboard in front of him, clattering against the dingy marble of the foyer at his feet. He stooped to pick it up, identifying it as a brass candlesnuffer. Turning its cold surface in his hands for a moment, he set it back where it had come from. "Aye," he murmured quietly. "I'll bet it's been an awfully long time."

He straightened and zipped his jacket as he backed to the front door. "I'm going now, but I'll come back. Understand? Tomorrow, I'll be coming back. You'll be here, I'm sure. We'll have a chat, you and I, maybe like gentlemen next time."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.

Mustard from the fast food burger dripped down his palm while he read a few pages of what he’d collected in the library. By late afternoon he had a folder full of stories copied out, anything he thought could be connected.

He'd spent a long and sleepless night in a motel just inside of town. Truthfully, he was excited. This was possibly the most phenomenal case he'd had, and he'd barely even begun. Ghost-hunting was a hobby, an obsession, really; a bid to understand things that couldn't be explained. But more often than not it was disappointing. This was something else. This was absolutely the real McCoy, and the dull sting on his back was proof.

He jumped from his reverie as his mobile rang, absently wiping his hand down his shirt to answer.

"Hullo?"

"You didn't listen."

Billy sighed, "No, Cate, I'm afraid not."

She echoed his sigh, but said nothing else.

"What? You have a bad feeling again? Are your ears twitching?"

"Billy," She warned, though her tone was gentle. "He has so much hatred. He's angry you’re there."

"I figured that part out all by my onesies, hen,” Billy ignored her concern, "You should see the state of my back."

"And you should see the state of mine," she returned hotly.

Billy boggled a little. "You… you can’t be serious. That's not even physically poss—"

"You understand very little about possibility, Billy," she retorted.

Billy sighed once again, shaking his head. "Cate, you know I don't understand your… connection to me, or whatever it is. But I'm all right with this. Truly. I think I might have something on this one."

"I don't expect you to trust me. You're always a skeptic first," she spoke with a quiet resignation. "You must be careful, Billy. With yourself. With him. He is more powerful than you know."

Billy stared blankly at the pages before him. "He's a ghost, Cate. That's all he is."

The phone clicked, and went to dial tone.

*

The lock stuck firmly against the key, and would not give until he heaved the knob upwards while turning, but eventually he was granted entry.

The time had long run out in his cameras. He replaced batteries and video cards in all three and then found a place to read, flicking on the lamp on a table in the parlor while dusk began to settle in. From his pocket he withdrew a digital voice recorder, hit the button to record and set it carefully upright on the table beside him, then got cozy in a dusty armchair with his findings on his lap.

He sat for a good ten minutes reading before the voice recorder beside him fell over. It was exactly the signal he'd been waiting for.

"I've been out reading today, at the libraries and town hall," he spoke to the house, unconcerned at an inanimate object moving of its own accord. "It's really amazing, the sort of records that are kept throughout history. I went through all sorts of certificates, property deeds, bank records, newspapers… you name it, some bloke kept it for whatever reason."

There was no response, so he continued, "Milton Keynes. Do you know, I never knew this shite before. Started up in the sixties, with all that ultra modern minimalist architecture and the hippies and the peace movement and all that. It’s probably all the Beatles fault, this. I was just a babe in Glasgow when it started up here. People have lived here for centuries before though, in the little villages. Haversham, Linford, Stratford. They’re more like suburbs nowadays. I wonder when you lived here."

The table lamp turned itself off, throwing the parlor into only what light sunset was pulled in through the windows. Billy calmly turned it back on and flipped to other pages. "See, according to the deeds I found, this house was built in 1874, owned by a physician by the name of Monaghan."

Billy felt the air temperature physically drop around his knees by at least ten degrees or more. "Is Monaghan your name?"

He got no answer and flipped through more copies. "Monaghan had apparently managed to work his way up in society. I imagine he must have done well for himself to be able to build up an estate like this, must have had ties to people high up. Doctors weren't generally land owners in those days, were they? Certainly not a place like this. No, they were middle class in Victoria’s day. Most of them worked off the back of a horse making house calls."

The cold spot spread throughout the room. Billy leaned forward, trying to feel how far it went. "Are you this… Dr. Monaghan?"

It felt very much as if he was being watched from all sides, but nothing happened and he sighed, reading through the various documents and wondering if he was even on the right track. He rewound the recorder and turned it up, but there were no sounds around or between his own voice.

In shuffling through the piles of copy, several of the papers slipped from his knees and whispered to the floor. He knelt to pick them up from the dusty rug, his hands reaching out for the pages that had gone the farthest.

A most unnatural sound issued all around, loud and yet not, sending a fierce chill sweeping through him. It was as if someone was standing over him and screaming, only the sound came from inside his own head. He scrambled for the paper on the rug, but it stuck down like it was glued, and that horrible sound continued so close and heavy…

Suddenly a freezing grasp had him by the face, like cold dead hands on his cheek, on the back of his head, forcing his nose down, down to the floor, to the paper beneath his face. With a shriek the sound cut off he was suddenly released, his own instinct to fight throwing him over backwards.

Billy fell hard on his backside, gasping for breath, the paper crumpled in his fingers. He stared around, trying to place the attacker, but of course no one was there. "Christ," he heaved, still panting as he climbed to his knees, "Really mate, I bloody well know you're here, you don't have to go all Linda Blair on me, all right?"

He smoothed out the paper in his fingers and tilted it towards the light. It was a copy of an old local newspaper that he didn't recall looking at. Three quarters of the way through his research, he'd downed multiple coffees and made copies of practically anything with bleary-eyed indiscretion, so that he didn't remember this article was no surprise. It dated to 1888, and detailed the infamous Jack The Ripper murders under a big headline. This seemed to be the second of them, the prostitute by the name of Dark Annie.

"Mate, you're not going to tell me…" Billy laughed in disbelief where he knelt on the carpet. Whitechapel was a far cry from Milton Keynes, there was no way… but then a smaller article off to the right of the main story caught his attention.

  


_The son of prominent Little Stratford citizen Dr. Austin Monaghan was discovered murdered in the family estate two days ago, September 6th. The body was found by a maid in the household, said to be grisly scene as police investigated the home, which stands on the hilltop above town. Dr. Monaghan's youngest son Dominic had been following_   


The article was cut off by the paper’s edge. Billy groped feverishly through the rest of his papers, sure he had copied out more, but he found nothing that fit together with this tiny bit of information.

"Dominic," Billy said the name out loud, and all the lights he had flipped on from the entryway to the parlor dimmed with a massive surge of energy. The breath was nearly taken from Billy's chest as he witnessed, for the first time in his life, a full-bodied apparition.

He was faded, transparent, but paced the floor before the chair across the parlor. The clothing he wore made him appear half dressed, with a billowy white shirt undone down the front half-placket of buttons, haphazardly tucked in. Braces swung loose at his hips from dark trousers, and he wore no shoes or socks. His face was that of a man, a young man with wild hair and a crooked mouth, and the eyes… Billy feared to blink under their intensity, the distrust and desperation with which he was studied.

The apparition slowly disintegrated into a smoky mist, even as it seemed to grow more agitated, and was gone. The lights grew back to their usual brightness, and Billy swallowed and mopped the sweat from his brow. He didn't want to admit it to this entity or anyone else, but in that moment he'd been utterly terrified.

"All right," he whispered, hauling himself from the rug with popping knees and collapsing back into the armchair. "Dominic. So, that's you, then? You were… you were murdered in this house. One… shite… one hundred and twenty years ago."

He glanced back at the story and laughed abruptly, "You're not going to tell me you were offed by Jack the Ripper, are you? He only went for whores, I thought."

The back of his chair thumped as if someone had kicked it hard from behind. "Jesus, mate, it was a joke. And anyway, that’s a fair ride away from here by horse, London is, that’s pretty unlikely."

He scanned the Ripper article, which also cut off at the bottom of several paragraphs, though the information was familiar. "Do you know people are still trying to solve that case, even now? There have been books and films…. Did you see that last one with Johnny Depp? That was…"

The lamp beside him rose from the table and smashed to the floor.

"Shite!" Billy yelled, angry now as he knelt to gather the pieces. "For fuck's sake, Dominic, don't you get that I'm not the bloody bad guy? I'll have to pay for this thing now! If it was antique Tiffany or summat worth more than my sorry life you and I can share lodgings for the rest of our pathetic existence – ah, fuckingarsingcunting hell!"

A piece of colored glass insinuated itself deep into his finger, drawing blood that looked purple in the dim light glowing in from the hall. When he yanked out the offending shard, it pulsed and throbbed. He whinged and stuck it in his mouth, sucking on the pain.

A sadistic, high-voiced chuckle rang out to his right, clear as a human voice in the room.

"Fuck you, then, if it's funny," Billy growled, squeezing his finger. He stumbled out to his van, finding the first aid kit he kept under the seat, then had to pause and wrestle with the stupid door that had locked him out again, and started up the stairs once back inside the house.

Right on cue, he found his way hedged by that anxious thick air, and an enraged hiss as he continued on from the landing. He groped for the light switch and then thought the better of it, remembering what had happened up here before. "Dominic, I'm just going to the loo to clean this cut. Can't you lay off your act for this once? Or at the very least be a gentleman's son and show me where it is."

The doors slammed one by one up the hallway, right up to the first door on the right from the stairway that remained open. Inside, its light came on by itself.

Billy cocked his head curiously and started slowly forward to the lit doorway, finding a spacious bathroom with brass fixtures, a chaise and a massive claw-footed bathtub. This had been clearly a later addition to the house, a room converted to accommodate the changing times and the luxury of indoor plumbing. The toilet hidden in a small alcove dated much later, Sixties or Seventies if Billy’s personal expertise in toilets said anything. That it was mustard yellow to match the far older wallpaper was a dead giveaway.

"Thank you, Dom," he smiled quietly. "They don't make them like this anymore. The one in my flat is about the size of a broom cupboard. I can piss in the toilet without even stepping out of the shower."

He looked up in the mirror as he rinsed the blood from his finger under a faucet that coughed and sputtered before it ran blessedly clear and cold. An oriental screen blocked half the tub from the door and a large vase of dead, dry flowers sat on a table behind him. The flowers on one side seemed to shudder in the reflection, and several fragile petals fell and crumbled to dust where they landed. A prickle went up Bill’s spine just knowing this ghost was watching every move he made.

"May I call you Dom? I don't know which you'd prefer. I'm Billy, by the way. It’s William, really, but Billy's what I go by."

He heard a tap from below him, and stepping back to open the cabinet door, he found the cupboard stocked with toilet paper, shaving cream and other essentials. Apparently Mr. Holm and his family must have had some plans of staying. Such modern manufactured things seemed completely out of place in a house haunted by a nineteenth century ghost. He chuckled. "Thank you Dom. Dominic. Which one? Can you tell me? Tap once for Dom and twice for Dominic."

He waited, and heard three distinct successive taps. "How very avante garde, young Monaghan. I think you're just arsing me around now." He fastened a bandage around the cut on his finger, and threw the paper in the bin.

"I'm not leaving any time soon, Dominic, so you and I might as well get to know each other. Dom or Dominic? One or two?"

Silence followed. Billy sighed and exited the bathroom, turning off the light. He glanced down the hall to the rest of the upper floor, feeling the air go stagnant even as he did it. He felt a tug on his clothes on the side closest to the stairs, and a not-so-gentle push from the other side. "All right, I get it."

Back in the parlor, he looked at the remains of the lamp and his piled research, the voice recorder still blinking its red recording light. He sat down and picked up the recorder, wondering if he was going to get anywhere with this.

"Dom? I like Dom, you know. It's short and easy. Friendly, even. You've hardly been Casper though." He held out the recorder, "This thing is like… sort of like a gramophone. I suppose that would have been the newest cool invention when you were a lad. It records sounds and plays them back, like my voice talking right now. Understand? Listen."

Billy rewound the feed a few seconds and played it back, repeating his last few sentences loud and clear, before he stopped it again, hit record and looked around the room, hoping for confirmation that Dominic was listening. “Can you speak into this machine, Dom? Can you tell me why you’re here?”

He waited, ran the feed back, but there was no sound but his own voice.

“Maybe I should tell you why I’m here, then?” Billy asked, then sighed, thinking. "My parents died when I was a boy, and my gran raised my sister and me. And I didn't… I didn't believe in any sort of afterlife or limbo or whatever, back then. Not until the night Mum came back."

He laughed nervously at the absurdity of telling something so personal to this strange entity, this ghost of a murdered lad of privilege from the Victorian days. It wasn’t his usual method, but he didn’t want another physical attack of the sort provoking could earn him. But now the house was dead silent, almost straining towards him, and he felt as though he had its undivided attention.

"I was twenty, the first time, and I was completely pissed. I'd been down the pub half the night and got dragged home by a mate, and I felt like death warmed over, you'll excuse the expression. But I felt… as I was being sick, it felt the way it did when I had the flu as a boy. Mum, rubbing my back, helping me get back to my bed after.

"The second time she came, she scared me so badly I ran off and stayed on Maggie's sofa for days. 'Course Maggie's my sister, so Mum would turn up there as well." Billy shook his head at the memory, turning the recorder over in his fingers. "Anyway, I first recorded her voice with one of these. Mum’s voice, ten years _after_ she had died. I couldn't hear it when she said it, but when I played it back, it was there. I guess maybe its easier, you don't have to pull so much energy for me to hear it. That's what I want to try to do with you, aye? Can you say something, Dominic? Can you speak into this recorder for me?"

Billy swallowed, holding his breath as the grandfather clock ticked several seconds away. He counted to thirty and then impatiently rewound the recording and turned the volume up high.

" _—what I want to try to do with you, aye? Can you say something, Dominic? Can you speak into this recorder for me?"_

__

__

_"...What did she say… Billy?_ "


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.

The van barreled down the M1 at well over the speed limit for some time before Billy calmed down enough to stop weaving through traffic and ease his foot off the accelerator.

It was one thing when to get a recording to prove that something happened. It was always fun to adjust the treble and white noise and try to pick through the weird sounds and syllables and consonants that sound like speech and make out if a word or sentence has been said, or if the mind was playing tricks.

It was quite another thing entirely when the honest-to-god ghost of a murdered bloke from a century ago asked plain as day what Billy’s mum had to say the first time he’d heard her voice since he was thirteen.

Billy scrubbed his tired eyes with the heel of his hand against the hours of reading and brightness of headlights. When he finally pulled off the motorway, he had no real idea where he meant to go until he found himself parked in the dark outside a familiar, though oft-avoided building just outside of Chinatown.

He gripped the steering wheel tightly, hands frozen in place. It was stupid that he’d run off in the middle of a session, in the middle of so much activity, for fuck’s sake. He’d freaked out and bailed like a piss-legged twat. Maybe it was for penance that he’d brought himself here. There was no escape now anyway; the light above the closed shop door blinked on and Cate emerged, wrapping a long cardigan over nightclothes.

“Sorry,” he muttered through the van’s window without really making eye contact. It never rolled up anymore, and the drive down had been frigid in the cold night air. That he was shivering, confused and hovering on the verge of terror made it all the more embarrassing.

“Come on up. I’ll make some tea,” she replied, turning back to the door.

Cate ran a metaphysical bookshop, darkened with odd shadows from the shelf tops, which held all manner of strange objects, statues of deities from various religions, candles and crystals, the pungent aroma of all manner of incense, and the bounding apparition of Cate’s sleek white cat that followed her everywhere.

Billy hovered awkwardly in the entry of her small upstairs flat until he was directed to sit at the kitchen table while she made tea. The cat leapt onto the tabletop, sat down with its feet primly together and its tail curled tightly around, staring at Billy and purring like a motorbike. It had odd-coloured eyes, one blue and the other green, which never failed to give Billy the heebies. Plus, he kind of objected to cats on eating surfaces on principle.

“Aloysius,” Cate murmured the name, and the cat immediately jumped down to the floor to weave through her legs. She set Billy’s tea in front of him, strong and milky with honey, exactly how he liked it. He chuckled as he took another sip.

He’d first come here over two years ago to fix a leak in the downstairs shop toilet, and over the span of an hour’s plumbing fix and light conversation on their shared paranormal interest, Cate became concerned for Billy’s welfare. She called it concern, anyway. Billy suspected their chakras had aligned just so while Mars crossed into Capricorn or some other shite to that effect. It almost bordered on infatuation of a bizarrely platonic variety. Cate was a mysterious and terrifyingly beautiful woman, and it’s not that Billy hadn’t thought about the possibilities there, considering she was the only woman that took any interest in him at all. It’s just that she was… well, _weird_. And she probably already knew all about the possibilities he’d thought about, which just made him turn pink around the edges any time he found himself in her presence.

Cate never advertised that she was a medium. Still, she had a gift of some sort, because immediately upon that first meeting, she had known things she couldn’t have known. For the first year afterward, she’d phoned him regularly with a variety of premonitions, everything from his sister’s husband falling ill to avoiding a certain diner, almost as though she couldn’t help herself. It came to the point he’d politely asked her to fuck off, and she had, for the most part. But Billy couldn’t help but notice she had an annoying tendency toward being right most of the time. After all, the next time he’d eaten at that particular diner, he’d spent a miserable night on his bathroom floor.

Now, here he was, in her kitchen sipping tea, waiting for an _I told you so_ that never came. Cate merely sipped from her own cup in amiable silence while the cat licked itself smooth, then tucked its feet under and pretended to sleep. Billy had nearly drained his cup before any coherent thoughts had managed to string themselves together.

“She told me the kettle was on,” he muttered, peering down at the dredges, “Mum, the first time I recorded her,” he gave a snort of bitter laughter. “I didn’t even have a kettle.”

It had been nothing more profound than that, nor had any of the few other times he’d managed to be aware of her. There had been no final words that hadn’t been said in life, no goodbyes or I love you’s. She didn’t say she was proud of the man he’d become. It had been nothing more than a residual trace of something she’d said so often, an echo of some Sunday morning a long time ago.

He didn’t try much anymore. It wasn’t as though it brought her back, or that he could speak to her about all his problems and she’d give the appropriate motherly advice he’d missed out on in his teenage years or the subsequent decade and then some after. She was still dead. Only whispers of her remained.

Still, it was easier to tell this to Cate sitting across from him, a solid, living, flesh-and-blood human being.

“They don’t do these things, Cate, they don’t want to know things like that,” He argued, though she’d offered no debate besides the mere possibility of disagreeing with him. “They don’t want change. They don’t have the capacity to understand beyond what they knew in their lives. There isn’t enough left of them to understand.”

He glared across the table at her as he finished his tirade. The cat had looked up at his raised voice, its mouth forming a serene sort of smile.

“Perhaps,” Cate ventured, her lips turning up in the same manner, “Ghosts were people too.”

Billy rolled his eyes. “Oh, I suppose you know them, then? Invite them in for a cuppa and quality discussion over biscuits? Tell me, what does your gran think about the new prime minister?”

“My grandmother still lives in Melbourne, and complains about my care packages. My Great Uncle Albert, though, he thought it was funny to knock pictures off the walls. I could see him when the others didn’t, laughing like Santa Claus at their faces,” she answered fondly before flicking her gaze back to him, “But I never met him in life. Alive. He died years before I was ever born. I know as much about ghosts as you, Billy. And if either of us really knew a damn thing, people would think we’re crazier than they already do.”

Billy blinked, “All due respect, love, I’m not the one selling paintings of Ganesh, Pan, and Mother Mary having a picnic.”

“No,” she smiled wryly, “But I don’t default on my credit cards buying military grade thermal cameras either.”

“I returned that bloody thing!” Billy grumbled, affronted. “Never even got to use it. It would come in handy about now.”

“Mmm. Paid your overdue bills though.”

Billy opened his mouth and shut it again. Never, ever get into it with a psychic. He sighed, and then laughed, the crazy giggle of a plumber whose life has just required him to hunt ghosts and solve centuries-old murders. “I don’t know what to do.”

Cate ruffled his hair and took their cups to the sink, then made her way to a small linen closet and pulled out blankets and pillows, making up the sofa in the adjacent living room. Billy watched dumbly from the archway, deducing eventually that she meant him to stay. Somewhere in the back of the flat, a clock struck one AM.

“I should go.”

“You should sleep,” she answered, without turning from her work.

Watching the shift of her slim shoulder blades beneath the cardigan, Billy was struck by something she’d said before, something that could not possibly…

She jumped at the touch of his hand, but stilled when he very gently pulled down the edges of the fine knitting, revealing the racerback vest she wore beneath. His own breath shivered out of him at the sight of her skin, where the welts on her back were a mirror of his own.

“How?” He whispered, “How, Cate? This isn’t possible, this can’t happen—"

“Well, it did!” she answered furiously, turning and hitching her clothing back up. Why didn’t you listen to me?”

“I never do, do I?” he tried, smiling faultily.

She glared at him, crossing her arms. “I thought you didn’t take money for these things.”

“How did you—" he gaped, but stopped guiltily.

“Please, Billy, the way you keep checking it’s there, you’d think you were toting a gun in your pocket.”

“I need the money,” he pleaded. “I’m two months past due on my rent, and I’ve hardly any business otherwise. I don’t have a choice.”

“Don’t you?”

Billy had no answer, waiting for her—the bloody psychic—to give him one. What else was he to do?

She only sighed. “You should sleep.”

“Cate…”

“You should sleep, so I can sleep.” With that she pushed him down to sit on the made-up sofa, then picked up a deck of tarot cards from the coffee table, shuffling them as she sat beside him.

Billy watched warily. Cate didn’t give readings, and he didn’t buy into this shite anyway. “Cate…”

She laid the deck on the table, ignoring his protests. “Cut the deck.”

Billy gave a sigh and did so. “It’ll come up with Death, I bet. Imagine that.”

She glared at him, picking up the card from the top of the place he’d cut and laying it down face up: the Moon, upside down. When she spoke, her voice took on that low tone of certainty. “Deception. Illusion. Trickery. Loss of control.”

She laid the next card beside it, the Five of Cups. “Blindness. Obsession. Lost love.”

Billy glanced from the cards to her face, watching her eyes trace the pictures and interpret their meanings. He knew with absolute truth that this rubbish thrived on everyone’s creative ability to apply vague descriptions to events in their own lives. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder… “Are you reading him or me?”

She didn’t answer, drawing the last card slowly, hesitating before she turned it over. Her hand trembled as she lay it down beside the others, her voice now a whisper, “The Ten of Swords. Pain. Ruin. Hope.”

She hastily stood as Billy gazed at the card. “Cate, are you reading him or me?” But she disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door.

“Goodnight to you too, love,” Billy grumbled exasperatedly, kicking off his shoes, turning out the lamp and huddling under the blanket on the lumpy sofa. The cat jumped up and settled into the crook of his elbow, still purring as ever, kneading its paws on the fuzzy blanket. He raised a hand tentatively to stroke it, smiling as the cat leaned into his touch. “What does she mean, eh?”

He took up the last card up from the table, studying the disturbing artwork in the sulphuric city light from the window. The card showed a dead man, prone on the ground, stabbed by ten swords. You didn’t get any more dead than that. “How does this mean hope?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.

Billy woke up in a cold sweat from a dreadful dream with a heaviness on his chest. Images replaying in his mind of the tarot card coming to life, the dead man morphing into people he knew, into himself, pierced with swords, images far more macabre than a deck of cards could show.

Dragging his mind from sleep, he opened his eyes to a dim pre-dawn and a white mass sat firmly on his ribcage, demonic eyes gleaming down like headlamps. He jolted fully awake and grabbed for it, realizing quickly that it was only the cat, warm white fur beneath his hands, glowing weirdly in the half-light. Far removed from Billy’s recent encounters with felines, this cat did not plant its claws or give an ungodly shriek at Billy’s gut reaction to fight. It only tilted its head and abruptly started up a loud purr, gazing down at him like some sort of Buddha. Gingerly, the cat lifted a white paw and tapped lightly at Billy’s eyelashes, making him blink.

“You’re as weird as she is,” Billy told the cat, lifting it off so he could stand and fold up the blankets, leaving them neatly on the arm of the sofa.

Teetering into his shoes, he found everything he’d come in with and tiptoed his way out, being sure the flat’s door and the shop were locked behind him, and then guided his van through sheets of drizzle and fog and early traffic back up the motorway out of London.

He’d gone about this all wrong. Botched from the very beginning, when he’d charged right in with no equipment, acquired no proof that he himself wasn’t imagining things and jumping to conclusions. He was not some scam artist who went in, got spooked and told the owner, “Yep, that there’s a ghost all right.” He hadn’t even reviewed the hours of DV he’d downloaded from the cameras he had set up after the fact, so as of now, all he had to go on was a digital voice recording, on a player that was still likely to be lying on the rug in the parlor, where he’d dropped it in his hurry to get out of there. _Excellent job, Boyd. Eventually your bollocks might just drop back into place._

Shivering in the chill surrounding the manor, he riffled through his equipment in the back of the van. He’d go in prepared, armed with a camera in one hand, and an electromagnetic field detector in the other. He would sweep the house properly, top to bottom, though it was early morning and the sun was becoming a gradient of light behind the overcast sky. He’d do it again after nightfall and compare notes. He would _not_ be an idiot and get over-excited if activity occurred. He would _not_ run off.

Digging out the keys and crossing the lawn to the house, he glanced around at the desolate grounds wondering how they’d once looked, but stopped mid-stride at what else had caught his eye; the stone building with a gabled roof and arching doorways along its long sides. Two days gone and he’d never set foot in or around the coach house. The old driver’s words echoed in his mind, forgotten after so much distraction.

_Don’t go in the coach house. Don’t go in there._

Billy checked the camera was on and the EMF primed, and abandoned his previous course.

The key to the coach house turned, and the door fell loose at the release of the bolt with a shuddery groan, almost like an airlock. The hinges shrieked as he pushed into the dark space, and fell heavily closed behind him.

The gabled west facing windows along the rafters lit the otherwise dark space along the aisle. To the sides were walled off sections, twelve feet wide, each with an arched set of doors to the outside, the ground below made of paving bricks, interlocked in a fancy herring bone pattern. As he walked through, he could smell traces of petrol, oil and wax, car smells. This building had been modernized into a garage at some point, and a nice one, probably by a collector. And what he found in the last space seemed to prove it.

It was a long, cream-coloured Beauford convertible, all sleek lines and art deco arches with leather seats and mahogany wood accents, bring to mind classic gangster movies and photographs from his grandmother’s albums. The chrome gleamed in the early light as he passed the camera over it, admiring little features like the side mirrors and the hood ornament in the viewfinder.

Just as he was wondering if this car came with the estate or if it had belonged to Mr. Holm previously, the EMF gauge in his other hand ticked once and then again. The ticks moved closer together, faster, building into a long piercing sound that rose in tone, the lights on the gauge rising all the way up to the reds. When Billy glanced around on the walls and rafters for an electrical source, an outlet or perhaps a fuse box, he was overcome with the oddest feeling, and had to stop and put a hand on the car to steady his footing.

The entire planet’s axis had suddenly gone off-kilter, a shockwave of vertigo rippling through his body. His stomach clenched nauseously and his head felt squeezed while his vision popped with bright lights and a drilling pain in his temples, sounds amplified and echoing as if through a tunnel. With a grunt, Billy doubled over and went to his hands and knees, the camera and EMF tumbling to each side. His fingers searched out and gripped the tight seams of paving bricks and clung to the floor beside the sparkling radiator of the car, hoping for the world to right itself. As he closed his eyes and tried to draw breath, an inhuman scream rent the air.

It sounded again, terrifyingly close, nearly on top of him where he crouched, followed by a fierce pounding, cracking, hollow noise. It shuffled and snorted and blew, something monstrous that Billy knelt supplicant before. Something he was quite certain would not be of the world he lived in if he opened his eyes.

He drew a desperate breath of air into his lungs, air that was warm and musty and filled with a heavy animal smell, a smell far away from motor oil and cold, wintry morning. He blinked at the floor and pushed himself up, seeing straw and dirt on the paving stones beneath his fingers, feeling the crunch of it under his knees. He glanced before him and saw no Beauford, but the wood slats just a foot from his nose, a wall of them that jumped forward with another sharp thwack, making him flinch wildly backward. Columns of sunlight fell from the gables, afternoon sun, swirling with dust. Another scream pierced the air from the beast behind that wall. He saw it briefly over the top as it moved by, sleek muscle and long black hair before it was gone, pounding and swishing and neighing shrilly as he picked himself up from the ground.

Billy’s monster was a horse, a magnificent black horse in a stall, a row of stalls in the coach house that was not as it had been when he’d entered. Carriages and sulkies gleamed across the aisle, horse-drawn carriages of bygone era, a time long before the Beauford and before cars in general, shining in rows of sunlight.

The horse paced the stall feverishly, kicking the walls and spooking at shadows as Billy stared, its long mane fanning out like licks of black flames, a creature that could not be more real if he touched it.

…Could he touch it?

“Hey, horse. Shh. Whoa,” he tried. He was nothing if not a born and bred city boy whose only knowledge of horses came from John Wayne movies, but he tried anyway to calm the beast, “Whoa there.”

The horse squealed and half-reared before it halted at the back of the stall, quivering, its scimitar ears perking to the sound of Billy’s soft voice. “Easy there. It’s all right now.”

Billy’s hands found the hitch of the stall’s gate, the cold steel of it beneath his fingers, the warmth of the wood, bits of horsehair caught on a corner.

The horse trembled where it stood, the whites of its eyes bloodshot. It threw up its head and blew, nostrils flaring red and its breath dragon hot against his palm.

“Easy, boy, girl, whatever you are. Easy, horse. Good horse,” Billy’s voice quavered as he held out his hand.

And he did touch it, real as anything, a velvet soft muzzle, the prickle of whiskers on its chin, the molasses smell of its breath. The horse quaked as though it had run a race, sweat glossy on its sides, damp, hard muscle beneath Billy’s palms.

The horse bellowed again and Billy jumped back, out of its way as it reared and pounded the walls with sharp, steel-shod hooves. Clambering over the wall, he stared as the beast kept spooking, kept screaming like a wild thing, enraged and crazed and looking for a way to escape.

Something dropped in his hair and he brushed it away absently, watching the horse and trying to slow the pounding of his heart. It didn’t seem possible that Holm had left a horse here, a stunning horse that had survived locked in a barn with no one tending it for days, screaming without his own notice as he came and went in the house not a hundred yards away. It was as real as he was, goddammit, it was alive. This couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be possible.

He felt a liquid plunk from above again, on his shoulder this time, sliding viscously down his jacket, dark and thick and bright, bright red, like… like…

“Oh Jesus,” Billy breathed, wiping it away and staring at the stain of it on his own fingers. Blood, warm and wet and real on his skin and in his hair, dribbling down in ribbons from directly above, and he so very badly didn’t want to look, but he did.

A body hung from the rafters. Hung by the neck in a dusty beam of the sunlight, dark, wet hair obscuring its face, clothes drenched in red, dripping from a fingertip, dripping right onto Billy’s face, in his mouth, and he could taste it, coppery and sharp on his tongue.

The horse’s screams filled the hot, thick air as Billy’s vision swam, the body swaying, the creak of the rope echoing, and then blackness crawled parasitic into his eyes and ears and underneath his skin, and he saw nothing more.

•

He groaned hoarsely as he came to, curled fetally on the ground. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was cottony and tasted of bile. His throat felt singed, and his head throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

He opened his eyes and saw sunlight, and the nightmare came back through him like a freight train. A terrified, terrifying horse and a body swinging from the very beams above him, bloody and oozing–

Billy slowly shifted to his belly, willing the need to be sick down and not managing it. He wretched on the stones but brought up essentially nothing, his stomach empty.

The light was full and sunny, coming down from the windows above in all too familiar shafts filled with swirling dust, warm, though he shivered under a cold sweat. Afternoon sunlight. Wondering how long he’d been out, he looked at his watch, tapping it curiously. It had stopped.

Sitting up, he found his camera on one side of his body and the EMF gauge on the other, undamaged by quick examination, but both drained of batteries nonetheless.

Before him, where the horse had been in the stall, sat the shining antique car.

He reached out and slid a finger along the chrome bumper. The floor was swept clean of dirt and straw, only a layer of dust remained. Hesitating, he tilted his head back, up at the rafters. There was only sunlight and dust eddies among the wood beams. No body, no blood in his hair or on his clothes, no horse. The car was parked just where it had been before the world had turned itself inside out.

It had to have been a dream. He must have got dizzy, passed out and had the world’s most vividly real nightmare. It could not have been real, and yet, he could swear he still smelled of blood and sweat and horse, could feel it clammy and sticking all over his skin. He felt shaky and ill as he stood, with a pounding headache and rolling gut, one hand reaching for the dividers of the stalls – _carports, not stalls_ he insisted in his head – to make his way the coach house door and pushed it open to the bright cold afternoon and blue sky.

Each yard to the house seemed a mile and he was winded well before reaching the door. The key turned easily and he thanked whatever deity minded doors for not having to fight with it now. All he wanted for the moment was to wash away the smell of death clinging to his skin and sleep for days.

But the climb up the stairs set his head spinning, blackness crawling into his vision again as he clung to consciousness at the top of the landing, the bathroom door just feet away. If he lost himself to it again, the nightmare would come back, with the body swinging above him, showering him in blood… he leaned against the wall and thrust his head between his knees, nearly whimpering in desperation.

Then there were hands, a steadying grip easing him gently forward, keeping him upright through the foggy dizziness and guiding his steps. He was pushed gently down into a cloud of comfort, covered in warmth, and the sweaty hair on his forehead brushed back with a cool, sweet touch. _Mum, you found me here too_ , was his final thought as the fear relinquished itself to a deep, black sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.

Billy woke to darkness. The canopy of a great bed loomed above him, its curtains drawn in a dark cocoon of velvet. The bed itself was unbelievably soft, though dusty, its linens cool to touch but warm around him. His head throbbed faintly and his throat was perilously dry, the only lasting threat he felt of whatever had happened.

He pushed open the curtains to find himself in a bedroom, large by his standards as his entire flat could probably fit inside it. Sliding unsteadily from the high mattress to look outside, he could see the coach house in the settling dusk, dark and abysmally normal in appearance. The thought of what he’d seen in there made his throat tighten up to quell the urge to be ill.

He turned to the room again, presumably one of the upstairs bedrooms he’d been denied before. By the door he found the light switch, the soft light pushing away the leeched colorless dusk and showing a room wallpapered in blue silk with panels and furnishings in walnut. Along with the bed, it held a fireplace, a massive wardrobe (empty, save for a set of new sheets still in the plastic packaging), a dressing table and a writing desk. The desk itself seemed much loved, its varnish cloudy on the writing surface, the pulls of the drawers blackened to a patina. There was nothing inside the drawers but inkstains where spills had long dried up.

Across the room were shelves built into the wall, full of books. They were covered in sheets of dust and cobwebs to where he could hardly read the names. He pushed a thumb along one spine to find the gold leaf on its title coming off in on his hand. Most were in English, but a few were in what he guessed might be Latin. Another looked to be French, _L’Anatomie_ in its title assuming it may be a medical guide of some kind. Volumes of poetry, naturalist’s notebooks, and novels, some of which might have been first editions. Billy wonder just how much a bloke could get on eBay for a collection like this, and this wasn’t even the manor’s library.

Presently he felt a change behind him, a shift in the air pressure that lifted the hairs on his neck and whipped his head around, expecting to see a person walking in. But he was alone, and the bedroom door remained closed.

Who had brought him to this room, when previously it had been off limits to the point of violence? It had a feeling of being occupied, of being lived in, currently, though the dust said otherwise. It gave him the feeling of being in a person’s space, wandering around and touching belongings with their owner watching over his shoulder.

“Dominic?” he said the name tentatively, his voice hoarse and sickly.

The lights flickered just slightly, dimming for a second as though a surge had run through the line, then brightening back to full light again.

“Dominic, if that’s you, can you do it again?”

Immediately, the light flickered again.

He eyed the two wall sconces, old and somewhat mismatched in their Art Deco design, likely both on the same wiring to that single switch. “Prove to me it’s you, Dom. Can you flicker each of these lights separately?”

There was a long pause, then the left hand sconce dimmed independent of the right. In a moment the right sconce did the same, then both, flickering back and forth.

Billy took a deep breath and swallowed, trying to clear his head and work some moisture through his throat. He had no recorders with him, trying to think where he’d left the two he’d had in the coach house, but even then they had no batteries left. He chuckled at how very clever this particular ghost was. So far Dominic had evaded most forms of incontrovertible evidence, though he was more than willing to make himself known.

“So you like lights, do you? Electricity?” he asked, looking at the bandaged cut on his hand from the broken lamp downstairs, and remembering the heavy hum of the one on the landing when he’d first come upstairs. The lights flickered yet again.

“Was that a yes?” Billy asked, and the lights flickered. “Show me something for ‘no’ and we can play Twenty Questions.”

A pause, and then the lights went off briefly before coming back on with the clicking noise of the switch.

“Good. Now maybe we’ll get somewhere,” Billy smiled, settling himself on the large blanket trunk at the bed’s foot and trying to think of what to ask. What he wanted to know most wasn’t easy to phrase as a yes or no question. “Is this your room?”

 _Yes_ , the lights flickered.

“Is this the room I couldn’t go into before?”

 _Yes_.

“Are the other rooms off limits?”

 _No_.

“Is this room off limits?”

 _No_ , the switch went off, but then flickered _yes_ when it came back on.

“That’s a maybe?” Billy sighed. It didn’t make any sense. He shook his head, thinking aloud, “Why would you practically attack me out there, but not in here?”

He scratched at a tickle on his ear absently, thinking of the welts on his back. The tickle lingered, and he slapped at it, looking around to find a cobweb, feeling in his hair for a spider. The tickle came again, cool against his forehead, like fingers brushing his hair back. Billy went still. “Dominic, is that you touching me?”

The lights flickered.

He shifted backwards slightly, away from the eerie feeling. “Did you bring me in here while I was ill?”

 _Yes_.

Billy brushed away the lingering feeling on his forehead. This Dominic had seemed curious spirit one minute and malicious the next. He had been brought here and had slept, obviously for a whole day in this room, Dominic’s room, unharmed, after an experience Billy had never had in his life and wasn’t keen on repeating. Cate had told him that the spirit here was powerful and angry. He wondered now if it had just been a dream, or if Dominic had somehow physically pulled him into another plane of existence, into another time. The idea was a preposterous as it was intriguing.

“This morning,” he asked, “Did you make it happen? In the coach house?”

There was no answer.

“Dominic,” Billy tried somewhat nervously, “Do you know you’re dead?”

_Yes._

“Do you know who killed you?”

 _Yes_ , the lights surged hard, sending a hum through the room.

“Okay,” Billy murmured. If that could constitute an emotion, it certainly was a strong one. He rather feared being lashed out at now with this line of questioning, but he wanted to know. He needed to know, though he never thought he’d be rid of the horrible vision in his head. “Were you killed in the coach house?”

 _No_ , the switch flicked off, and then on and off, repeatedly. _No, no, no._

“Okay, all right, Dom,” Billy held out a placating hand, and surprisingly, felt it tingle as if it had been slapped. “Don’t get mad at me, I just want to understand you.”

The lights surged again, brightening fiercely and then dimming to almost nothing, and the temperature abruptly fell a good twenty degrees. But with a sound like a sigh, the light slowly faded back to normal. Billy understood this as Dominic trying rather hard to physically manifest as he had in the parlor, though that had taken the energy of many more lights in the house.

“Don’t tire yourself, lad,” Billy smiled, “You don’t need to show me everything.”

The lights flickered again, twice, almost as if Dominic were saying, _Yes I do_ , like a despondent child.

“You want to tell me things?”

 _Yes_.

Billy laughed, “Why me? Why not any of the other people you’ve chased away from here?”

_No. No._

Billy sighed, trying to figure out what Dominic was trying so hard to say. He chuckled again, imagining a ghostly Dom, just as frustrated as he was. “Dom, my recorder. If I go get it, maybe we could actually talk to each other.”

_No. No. No. No._

“Why?” Billy got up, moving toward the door. “It would be so much easier, and I could get a camera as well and see if–“

 _No. No. No .No._ The lights flicked fiercely on and off. The air settled thickly on him as he reached the door, the same heavy anxiousness that the hallway had at the top of the stairs. A tug on his clothes pulled back into the room, and the lights surged hard again, popping and humming.

Billy took a step back, shaking his head. “Dom, you can’t keep me in here like a prisoner.”

_No. Yes. No._

“I’m glad we agree,” Billy grumbled, clueless. “If I got my equipment – my machines, you understand? It would be easier for us to communicate.”

_No. Yes. No. No._

“Dammit. I don’t know what the fuck you want to say, Dom. What is it? You don’t want us to talk, you don’t want me to leave? What?

_No. No. Yes._

“No, yes, what? Which bit? You don’t want me to leave?”

The air crackled statically around him, but Dominic didn’t answer.

“You don’t want me to leave, or you do?”

Randomly, the corner of the area rug at the foot of the bed flipped up, as if kicked in frustration. Billy snorted at it and went for the doorknob.

 _No_. The rug flipped up again.

Billy eyed it warily. Dominic may well just be throwing a tantrum. The logical part of him wanted to believe the window was open, or a vent had come on, and that a simple gust had made the rug move, but he knew that wasn’t the case.

He came back and pushed the corner of the rug back into place with his toe.

It promptly flipped right back over, and the lights flickered a strong _yes_.

Billy hesitated, then knelt down, took the corner of the rug and pulled it away from the floor.

“Oh god,” he murmured, his heart pounding against his ribs. On the floorboards hidden beneath the rug was a wide stain, dark brown on mahogany, its grain raised and the sheen over it different from the rest, as if all the scrubbing and sanding and refinishing in the world hadn’t removed it.

“Dom, this is where…”

_Yes._

Shivering, he spread his hand out and lay it over the darkened floorboards, as if doing so could close a gap in time. “What happened to you?” he whispered, sadness washing over him. “Who did this to you?”

The lights surged hard and died completely, reassembling in a mist on the floor, taking the shape of the same man he’d seen in the parlor, lying beneath him with the stain spread around in an ever-widening pool, draining his life away. Billy could almost feel a heartbeat slowing beneath his palm and with a jolt realized where he was, kneeling above a dying man, precisely in the same place as his killer.

He jumped up, swaying on his feet, and stumbled toward the door, even as the lights swelled back to life.

 _No, no_ , blinked the switch, the air converging around him as he reached for the handle.

“I can’t, Dom, I need to get out.”

 _No. No. No_.

“I’ll come back.”

_No. No. No. No._

Billy twisted the door handle and pulled it open.

_“Billy, don’t go!”_

He hesitated at the voice, a plea he could hear with his own ears, calling his name.

Then he was caught in the vicious grip of an unseen hand, yanked out into the hall and driven toward the staircase, every electrical source in the house throwing sparks. The force pushed hard, unstoppable, and he instinctively leaning away as it did not let up at the stairs, it meant to push him all the away down…

His feet slipped down the first few stairs and he flailed, just managing to grab the banister and stop himself tumbling down. The bedroom door slammed shut, sounding as if someone was pounding and kicking on it, and that same scream from inside his head was so fierce that Billy let go and fled down the stairs, covering his ears and squeezing his eyes shut.

Minutes later, when he lifted his head to look and listen, the house was utterly silent and still. He picked himself up off the floor, disgusted to find himself huddling by the entry like a terrified kitten. He made his way down the main hallway to the kitchen where the tap to the sink spluttered before it ran cold. He thrust his hands beneath it and drank deeply, running his wet hands over his face and hair to take away the fever of fear and try to bring reason back into this fucked up place.

Slowly, he moved back through the house to the parlor, staring for the moment at the mess he’d left there, a scattered pile of papers, his audio recorder among them, and the gathered bits of glass from the broken lamp. He set about collecting the papers, pocketing the recorder, feeling more and more like a twat by the second.

This whole experience was a mess, that was what it was. He’d spent three days now tripping around like a complete idiot, cowering at shadows and jumping at every little noise, and still he had no idea what the fuck was going on here.

A light moved across the room, the known, normal light of car headlamps skating around the darkened walls through the windowpanes. Quickly grabbing the papers and the keys he found on the floor of the foyer, he went outside into the cool night, seeing the elderly Mini stop halfway up the drive. Cate climbed out, tugging her coat tightly around her body in the dark, staring unblinkingly at the coach house.

“Your phone is dead,” she informed him as he reached her, her gaze still fixed.

“I’m not surprised,” he answered, looking her over. He debated asking how she found the place, but thought the better of it. “Did you see?”

Her shiver was all the answer he needed.

When she finally pulled her eyes from the coach house to the manor, she seemed perplexed. “Strange.”

She pointed and Billy followed her finger. One window on the upper floor was lit, the lights still turning on and off and flickering sporadically.

“His name is Dominic,” Billy told her, watching the light. “That’s his room.”

“No,” Cate said, her eyes shifting back and forth between the two buildings, the manor and the coach house, her voice the low, certain tone of her premonitions. “There is hatred all over this place. Rage. Vengeance. But not there.” She pointed at the window again. “Not there.”

Billy watched the light in the window pause and flicker.

“There are two.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.

“ _What did she say… Billy?_ ”

The recorder played the voice again between them in the dim booth of a pizza parlor.

“So you’re telling me there are two ghosts there?” Billy asked again, mopping marinara from his calzone off the table with a napkin. “You couldn’t have told me this earlier?”

“I didn’t know,” she said, pushing her half eaten pasta away. “Obviously one is enormously stronger than the other. And the anger there is very strong, Bill. You should know by now that a negative energy will do anything to overpower a positive one.”

“Right, and I how should know this?” Billy scoffed, “In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit shite as a ghosthunter and also, not in tune with random energies and planetary alignments like some people.”

“Obviously. This is nothing to do with either,” she said patiently, “It’s basic physics at this point. More negative energy will overwhelm and trap a positive in a space, and vice versa.”

“I’m a plumber, Cate. All I know about physics is that Newton sat under the wrong tree.” He sat back into the cushioned booth, “That doesn’t explain what happened. What I saw in that coach house. It doesn’t explain why he let me in his room, but tried to kill me outside of it.”

“Doesn’t it?” she asked, “I had no idea your Dominic was there until I got far too close,” she shivered, drawing her cardigan closer. “I could only feel the other, the angry one.”

“And Dom isn’t angry?” Billy asked, “I would be if someone had murdered me. At least let a bloke finish putting his clothes on.”

“He might have been once, sure,” she said, gazing at the recorder from which Dom’s voice had emanated, “The energy in that room is different. Wistful, almost. And betrayed too, but nothing like the other one.”

Billy shifted his soda back and forth on the table thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s something else? Like a… I don’t know, an elemental, or something.” He squirmed around the idea, uncomfortable with the notion of accepting the weirder bits of paranormal stuff he didn’t quite buy into.

“No… no,” she shook her head, gazing out into space. “It doesn’t feel like that, he’s human. A man so completely consumed with vengeance that there’s little human left of him.”

She sat thinking, her chin propped on one slim hand while Billy finished his calzone, starving now that he had his appetite back. The idea that there were two ghosts only made him more frustrated, and annoyed he hadn’t parsed it out sooner himself. It was an amateur mistake to make. And it did little to explain the events of the last few days anyway. He couldn’t separate which ghost he was dealing with at any given time.

“None of this makes sense,” he griped, shaking his head, “People have been in and out of there far more often than just me and Holm. I mean, the place has been fully wired for electricity, and that long after Dom’s time. It has indoor plumbing, and a yellow toilet straight out of 1972. That coach house has been turned from a barn into a fancy garage. Dom and this other fucker didn’t stop anyone from modernizing the place.”

“If you had all the time in the world, what would you do with it?” she merely shrugged, “They may feel bound to the place, but they aren’t always against or even conscious the goings-on there. Sometimes they sleep, like we do.”

“Everyone knows restorations make them act up,” he argued, “They don’t like it when their world is changed, especially their home.”

“That isn’t always true, or none of the ancient buildings in the world would have survived to this day. People have lived and died in nearly every old house in this country, whether they owned it or not.”

“It’s Monaghan’s name on the deed, though, look,” he shuffled through the papers, finding the property deeds and the article about the murder to show her. “His father had the house built in 1874. If Dom died there in 1888, then he spent at least… fourteen years there. I’d wager that was most of his memorable life; the man I saw couldn’t have been much more than twenty.”

“But you don’t know that this other man didn’t also own the place,” she countered. “Someone owned that land before they did, and someone owns it now. They may not even be from the same time period, Billy. And anyway, I don’t believe your Dominic would have kicked up as much fuss over changes as the other,” she picked up the recorder, “He seems curious about the world after his own time. You said he likes electricity.”

“But I didn’t find any other records of ownership. I didn’t even find any record of another death at the place, even though there was some bastard swinging above my head in that barn,” Billy scrubbed his hand through his hair, remembering the vision, though it turned his now full stomach. “His clothes… they were Victorian clothes. He was wearing a grey… frock coat. His hair was wet. He wore a waistcoat and a cravat, one of those poofy white neckties, you know, but it was all covered in blood.” He saw it in his minds-eye, dribbling from slack fingers and old-fashioned cuffs of the hanged man, a glint of silver beneath syrupy red. “He wore a ring.”

Cate nodded, a shudder going through her. “I saw.”

Her input pulled Billy out of his thoughts. “You said the negative energy trapped the positive, but it isn’t like that,” he said, trying to work this sticky point out, “Dominic brought me into his room after I saw that in the coach house. And he appeared to me first in the parlor. Nothing stopped him coming out of his own space. It’s not as if he’s trapped in just that room.”

“How do you know who you saw? How do you know which is which?”

Billy blinked, seeing that brief vision of the ghost in the parlor, reliving what he felt, what his mind generated when the ghost showed him the stain on the floor, touched him in the bedroom.

“No… that was him, it was Dom.”

“How are you certain?” she asked.

He shrugged and shook his head. “I just know. I looked him in the eye when he… I just feel it. Is that wrong?”

Cate smiled, putting her hand over his on the table. “Intuition is the closest thing to the Sight most people have. You should listen.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, you’re here, you can tell the difference.”

“No. I’m not staying,” Cate shook her head firmly. “I can’t go near that place again. I only came to be sure you were okay.”

“What, you couldn’t tell from afar?” he snapped, “Your spidey sense didn’t work it out?”

“I was torn out of my bed to see you covered in blood and looking like you might get trampled by a nightmare,” she drilled him with an icy cold look. “And then you were unconscious for hours and nothing I tried woke you. Don’t you dare get your independent shut-in pedestal out now, Billy. I was worried sick.”

Billy was taken aback, if only for a moment. “But I need your help. You can talk to them, you can–“

“I can’t!” she cut him off sharply enough that nearby patrons glanced up. She picked up a spoon and stirred her tea, lowering her voice, “You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t,” he sat back, betrayed, “Explain.”

“My mind is like a gateway between here and there,” she said, “I can’t help what I am, Billy, I can’t shut it out. People like me are vulnerable.”

“What? So, if Patrick Swayze jumps into your body the whole world would fall in?” he chuffed at the ridiculousness.

She laughed hotly back. “If Patrick Swayze jumped into my body I’d be fine. If your Dominic did, I’d probably be fine. But if this other did, this hateful, awful man,” her voice quavered at the thought, “Mind you, most human spirits wouldn’t do that, the idea of using a body that’s already occupied is as abominable as filling a corpse, and they have moral limits the same as they did when they lived. But one could do it. If their intent is foul enough, they’d stoop to anything, same as in life. He could use me against you.”

Billy studied her face, putting it all together, “He could make you hurt me.”

She nodded, giving a great sigh and looking out the dark window of the pizza parlor at the traffic. “This entity, I think he used all his considerable strength to show you what you saw this morning, to pull you into that other place. He will have used the time to build back up.”

“I think he already has, if he nearly managed to throw me down the stairs just now. It must have been him then, not Dom.” Billy connected the dots, “That will be why I couldn’t get up there before, why he didn’t stop Dom getting me into his room that time, because he’d weakened himself by pulling me into the past? Oi, maybe it’s the other way around?” he speculated, “Maybe Dominic’s room is a refuge, where this other ghost can’t go?”

“Maybe. The rules they work out between themselves aren’t set in stone, they can be as individual as they are. Anyway, I’m sorry, but I can’t go back there,” she shook her head at him, “And you shouldn’t either.”

“Bugger that,” he said vehemently, “This is personal now. Dom wants to talk to me, he wants me to see the truth. He called me by name, Cate, I heard his voice. And this other thing is hellbent on keeping him from doing that. It might be the only way to get the both of them to move on, which is the whole point, really. It’s what Holm is paying me half a year’s salary to do, isn’t it?”

“Billy,” she said with the exasperated patience of a parent, “Some souls don’t move on because they simply never wanted to leave.”

He didn’t have a witty retort for that. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t spent enough time wondering why ghosts existed at all, why they’d stick around whether they’d lived a long full life and died naturally or had it viciously cut short, why they’d hang about over relatives lives even though they couldn’t really be there. Maybe it was just the opposite of what anyone believed. Maybe there was no moving on. Maybe people died and were simply there, a soul without a wrapper. Maybe the less they cared about staying, the farther apart they drifted from the shape and the heart they used to fill.

“Do you remember when we were children?”

Billy nodded absently before he processed her words and doubled back, “What?”

“We would play together, you and I,” she said, her voice quiet and faraway.

“I don’t think so,” he said, confused. “I thought you grew up in Melbourne.”

She turned her bright eyes on him. “I did. But I came to visit you, every day for a time, when we were very young.”

Billy stared at her, something odd running through his head. It was as if a thought fired and couldn’t quite reach the end of its thread, a memory that was long lost. “What do you mean?”

“Children are only a step away from the doors, Billy. We come to this world innocent of the limitations of humanity. We believe in faeries and monsters under the bed and Santa Claus because no one has told us not to. We can remember our past lives. We are convinced that if we jump off a swing at the top of its arch, we can fly.” She smiled and took his hand, “We have imaginary friends.”

“No,” Billy shook his head, even as heat sprang to his eyes and a little girl with white-blond hair and bright, bright eyes flitted through his memory like a butterfly. “That’s… not possible.”

“You understand very little about possibility, Billy,” she murmured. “I used to bring you flowers in your wintertime. You tried to give them to your mother, but she couldn’t see, and one day she shouted at you to stop it. She said you were frightening her. I left you alone after that. Eventually I lost the ability to think myself so far away, as everyone does.”

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes to push out the sting, the rush of fleeting memories from a lifetime ago giving him a headache. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“You weren’t to know,” she shrugged, “You told me to leave you be, Billy, but now you’ve gone and stuck your foot into the other side. You’ve been there now, against your will. You _believed_ as children do while you were there, and that’s what he wanted. The door you shut so firmly is open again. I warned you.”

“Aye, so you said,” he mopped his face with his hands and sighed, “If you’ve got any more mindfucks in store for me, now would be a good time, eh? While you’ve got all my bloody defenses are down.”

She lay her hand over his again, “No. Not from me, anyway. You just be careful. Or take my advice and leave it alone. Give Holm his money back and come home.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

She stood, gathered her coat and purse and cupped his cheek tenderly before sweeping out of the pizzeria without another word. He watched her Mini pull from the carpark and vanish down the road. “Why do you never say goodbye?” he wondered aloud.

He poured over the rest of his papers, finding absolutely nothing to further what he already knew, drinking refills until the pizza parlor was closing and the manager not-so-graciously escorted him to the exit to lock him out.

It was one in the morning when he pulled back up at the manor, wide awake now, having slept the daylight away. He glanced up at Dominic’s window as he got out of the van, finding it dark, the place looking old and unassuming and completely devoid of life, or non-life, as the case might be.

“All right,” he murmured, pulling the keys to the house from his pocket.


	8. Chapter 8

The lock stuck so firmly that Billy had to simultaneously heave upwards, twist both key and doorknob, and curse it creatively until it finally gave way. The house loomed over and around him, the long hall dark and foreboding with his new knowledge that someone else was here watching, someone besides one murdered young man.

He clicked on the light, finding one of his cameras set on the hall, its battery unsurprisingly dead. He left it, moving forward into the house, clicking on lights as he went, no sound at all but his own breath. 

What he wanted was a do-over, a clean slate. Collecting proof of the existence of ghosts seemed immaterial now. Billy knew they existed. He’d known it long before he’d come here. This was no longer about proving it to anyone. 

He advanced slowly down the main hall. On his first walkthrough, his head had been full of camera angles, drafty windows and faulty electricity. He’d roundly ignored the idea that this was someone’s house once, crafted with a family in mind. He neglected to think about it as a home, the place where Dominic grew up, where he lived, and for some unknown reason, where he died, young and violently. It was about people, real people. _Ghosts were people too_ , Cate’s voice said in his head, and he smiled wryly.

In the music room, he walked the perimeter, studying the paintings on the walls, skirting round the chairs and settees. At the piano he lifted the lid and slid an unschooled finger along the out of tune higher keys, and thought about just how long it had been since he’d bothered to take his old guitar out of its case. Who in Dominic’s family would have played, he wondered, who would they have entertained in this room? It brought to mind those period films Maggie was so fond of, and that he typically fell asleep trying to watch, the language so pomp and the people so stiff and formal.

Dominic was the son of a doctor. A particularly well-off doctor, he thought as he entered the study, but a middle class man nonetheless. The smell of leather and paper and dust was heavy in this room, full of books and high wingback chairs, and a big carven desk. He brushed cobwebs from one set of books, thumbing carefully through the thin parchment pages which showed, in gruesome detail, drawings of organs, some spread open or cross sectioned. The text was Latin, which might as well have been Greek for all Billy could make of it. Austin Monaghan had been a well-educated man, and likely he’d expected it of his son as well.

After a quick turn though the dining room with its long table and straight-backed formal chairs, he came to the kitchens, which he’d given only a cursory look before. The ceramic sink where he had slaked his thirst seemed original, as was the butcher-block preparation table dominating the center of the room, which must have been sanded down numerous times. There was a magnificent old cast-iron cook stove as well, a thing that had to weigh near a ton. It must have cooked many a proper supper for Dom’s family and guests. However, to the other side of the kitchen was an almost modern group of appliances, from the refrigerator to the electric stove, at least the age of most of his own kitchen back in his sorry flat in London.

Another door off the kitchen he’d assumed to be a pantry led down a narrow flight of stairs, and there was no light switch here. Pulling a penlight from his pocket, he descended, the smell of earth strong in his nostrils. The brick walls were icy cold under his fingers, and the floor underfoot was hard-packed dirt. Rows of wine racks stood empty, save for a few dusty bottles dating again from the sixties. 

He shivered at the chill, the temperature down here in a room dug deep into the hill far colder than the rest of the house, perfect for a wine cellar. The hairs on his neck stood up as he walked among the wine racks, his ears almost pricked for any noise but the shift of dirt beneath his trainers. He felt odd, a little lightheaded, and stopped to put a hand out on one rack to take a deep breath, his pulse beginning to race. He took another step and felt his stomach flutter, felt heat rise in his skin like a fever.

But it wasn’t the sick, gut-wrenching feeling he’d had in the coachhouse. He took another cautious step and gave a nearly involuntarily exhale as the rest of it bowled him over, a feeling he hadn’t experienced in quite a long time, really. He gasped another breath as his groin inexplicably tightened, heat pooling low with arousal.

He flushed heavily, though no one was here to see. He looked down along the darkened space between the wine racks and could see nothing, but his mind insisted, something had happened here in the dark.

He tsked to himself. There was no way he could know that. There was no way he should be feeling what he was feeling. And yet, heat ran through him, the hot, immediate, naughty feeling of a secret tryst, of the possibility of being caught, an excitement and urgency he hadn’t felt since he was quite a young man.

He held his breath and closed his eyes for a time to quell it. When he looked again, there was still nothing but bare brick and empty cellar, the feeling melting away as if it had never been. 

Back to the main floor, he walked back down the main hall to the foyer, standing at the foot of the stairs for a long while in the silence. “I know you’re here,” he spoke quietly, all of his senses pricked, “Both of you.”

There was a sound like a breath being taken, and the room temperature plummeted around him, but nothing else. He took one himself, deep and centering, and started slowly up the staircase.

The anxiousness descended as expected as he arrived on the landing, clutching the banister just in case. It felt as though he was moving through water, a presence swimming around him, making itself utterly known.

He came to Dominic’s door, still shut. He reached for the knob and then jerked away with a hiss. The knob burned like it was bright hot, and even as he stared and his scorched palm and fingers, the stuffy air pressed around him, a warning. 

Billy sighed, annoyed. “Dom,” he called, “Your old mate won’t let me in. Maybe you can come out? Talk with me some more?”

Silence. There wasn’t even a flicker of the lights. He turned, looking down toward the rest of the upper floor, feeling that immediate intensity blocking him. “Maybe you can grow a set and talk to me yourself, yeah?” he challenged, bracing himself, but nothing happened.

He took a step past Dominic’s door, and another, and the air descended, even his ears popping and eyes smarting with the pressure change. Another step had his ribs feeling on the verge of collapse, a claustrophobic fear setting off as his lungs seized. He couldn’t force himself any further, retreating to the relative safety of Dominic’s door.

“Why can’t I go back there?” He muttered, mostly to himself. If Holm had purchased this place, he couldn’t have done without seeing the whole house, and others had lived here prior. Why was he specifically being blocked? “What is it I’m not allowed to see?”

But his questions brought no answer, from Dom or otherwise.

The rest of the night continued in this vein as he went back to the parlor. He tried for conversation with his recorder, and with the lights. Several hours worth of little to no response left him frustrated, pouring over his papers again in search of some new bit of information to use, hoping to strike a nerve, but nothing worked. After all that had already happened to him, and Cate’s discovery of this new entity, he couldn’t help but feel duped.

It was a misty dawn when Billy sat up and yawned, bored and frustrated with yet another night of more questions and no answers. Stretching, he pulled himself out of the chair and made his way down the hall to the kitchen.

He searched the cupboards, locating a few chipped cups and some tea bags, but there was no kettle, and in his rummaging he only came up with a pot that had been used to catch a drip beneath the sink, covered in years of lime scale and completely useless for boiling water. It peeved him further that such a leak could have easily been remedied by simply tightening a joint fitting, but this was unnecessary now as the lime had sealed the leak up on its own many years ago. A shoddy, forgotten fix was certainly not a proper fix, in Billy’s professional mind. This whole place would probably benefit from being replumbed entirely.

Glancing up at the breaking dawn through the windows, he jumped a clear inch at what he saw go passed: the brim of a hat, a quick yet lurching step. It was half obscured in the thick morning fog, ghostly and unreal, yet he simply _must_ have seen it. He leaned over the sink and craned his neck against the panes of glass, but the vision was gone around the edge of the house.

He ran for the kitchen door, yanked it open and trotted round the corner, where he now saw this ghost was, in fact, a living man, walking quickly with a cane, wearing a straw panama hat.

“Oi! What are you doing?” Billy yelled, his heart nearly throwing itself against his ribcage.

The man started and turned, as surprised as Billy was. “Oh!” He exclaimed, coughing a bit, before turning full around and spreading his hands wide in placation, the cane looped over his wrist. “I am sorry. I’m afraid I was trespassing, and knowingly at that.”

Billy looked him over carefully, assessing his harmlessness. He was an elderly chap, the hat topping a bearded, kindly face. He wore tan slacks, and cardigan a few shades lighter with suede patches on the elbows over a crisp white shirt, a light scarf tied loosely round his neck. Despite age and the cane, he stood quite upright.

“I’ve noticed lights up here the past several weeks, you see, though I’ve known this house to be vacant for some time, so I’m afraid my curiosity bested me this morning.” The old man’s voice was warm and rumbly, though clearly schooled, not unlike Holm’s high toned and proper speech. “Do accept my apology.”

Billy found his own gutter born accent coming through in response, “I didn’t see a car pull in.”

“Oh no,” the man nodded, smiling and pointing vaguely the direction he’d come from, “No, I came up the hill from the village. I rather enjoy a walk on a fine autumn morning, though I’m afraid my knees do not agree anymore, particularly with these damn hills. But I do apologize, and I’ll simply go the way I came. I shall not darken your doorstep again, as it were.”

The man gave him a wide berth, leaning heavily on his cane with the lurch in his step from an aching knee, making his way back toward the crest of the property. “Doesn’t matter much to me, it’s not mine,” Billy said, and the man stopped and turned back to him, “The house. I’m only working on it. I’m a plumber.” He indicated his van parked at the opposite corner, with his name screened on the side. He wasn’t quite willing to divulge the real reason he was here.

“Ah,” the man nodded politely. “I imagine it needs a great deal of work, as you’re certainly not the first. Good luck to you.”

“How do you know that?” Billy asked, more curious than anything.

The old man smiled, looking up at the manor fondly. “Because many years ago, I called this place my home.”

“You lived here?” Billy asked sharply.

“Oh yes,” the man confirmed, looking Billy over thoughtfully before coming forward to put out his hand, “Ian McKellen, at your service.”

“When?” Billy asked, and got a rather twinkling but stern look for his impropriety. “Sorry, Billy Boyd.”

“Charmed, Mr. Boyd,” McKellen smiled broadly at that as they shook hands. “Yes, I lived here when I was a young man. But why would a plumber be so interested, I wonder?”

Billy took in the old man’s curious and yet knowing expression. He shrugged nonchalantly, “It’s an old place. Seems like it has a lot of… history.”

“Indeed,” McKellen’s eyebrows rose. He looked at the packet of teabags still clutched in Billy’s other hand. “Perhaps you’d allow me to reminisce over tea, if you’ve time for a break? But, of course, I wouldn’t dream of it if the new owners have you indisposed.”

“No, they not even moved in yet, I’ve got time,” Billy said, shifting the packet around. “I’d rather a coffee, to be honest, but there’s no kettle here. Nothing to boil water but an old rusty pot I found under the sink.”

McKellen laughed heartily, “Good lord, still there? That’ll be Patrick’s handywork. My housemates and I were not plumbers, I’m afraid,” he grinned, “Well, this is easily remedied. Why don’t you come down the hill to my cottage? I’ll wager my tea leaves are considerably fresher than those. Or I have coffee, if that tempts you.”

Billy smiled at the old man’s charm. He turned back toward the kitchen door, rubbing his arms at the morning chill. “I’ll just get my jacket, then.”

“Of course,” McKellen followed, pausing at the threshold, “May I? It’s been so long since I’ve been inside.”

Billy shrugged, “Suit yourself. Like I said, it’s not mine, the bloke who owns it left me with the keys.”

The old man followed him through the main hall to the parlor where he’d left his jacket thrown over the side of an armchair. As he shrugged it on, all of the lights flickered, humming, and a draft flew around and through the room.

“I see the electricity is still a bit temperamental,” McKellen merely chuckled, and the lights gave another popping surge. The old man’s eyes trailed around at them, smiling with remembrance and something else, “Yes, it’s been so very long, hasn’t it, old friend?”


	9. Chapter 9

The old man lived on the outskirts of Little Stratford, which was now more a modern burb of Milton Keynes than the village it had once been a century ago. His cottage was older and smaller than many of the houses around it, once a farmstead that grew neighbors—“like weeds” as McKellen put it—when developers bought up the land.

“I admit, I’m surprised none of them have gone after the old house up there,” he said, pointing out the windows before limping to the kitchen to start tea and coffee brewing. There was a clear view of the hill from the old man’s parlor now that the morning’s mist was beginning to dissipate, the manor at its summit looking rather cold and lonesome. “I would have thought someone would knock it down and build more of these identical houses in its place.” 

“Has no one lived in it since you, then?” Billy asked, still looking about the parlor at McKellen’s effects and photographs.

“The very few who did never stayed for long,” Ian returned, standing in the archway. “I had heard someone purchased it years ago… must have been ’82 or ’83. But they left in rather a hurry.” The old man gave Billy a pointed look before he turned back to the kitchen.

The old man knew, then. He simply must, with the way he’d seemed to greet the old place. Billy took a deep breath, crossing to look at the knickknacks displayed on the mantelpiece. There were photographs of several people in elaborate costumes, including McKellen in much younger years, as well as a metal circlet of olive leaves, silken gloves and old champagne bottles, awards with the comedy and tragedy masks. Toward the back, in a small, dusty frame was a medal, and it took Billy a moment to put the words engraved on it together with what it actually was.

“For God and the Empire,” McKellen gave a small laugh as he reappeared with a tray, his cane looped over one forearm. He tried not to jostle it, but the lurch in his step set the china tinkling. Billy darted over to take it from him. “Ah, thank you, my lad, this damn knee of mine.”

Billy set the tray on the coffee table, sitting before it as he looked back at the mantle. “You were knighted?”

“Yes, yes,” Ian his tone somewhat tiresome as he slowly lowered himself in a well-used armchair, palming the bad knee. “Many years ago now. Contributions to the Dramatic Arts,” he sighed, gesturing to the other photos on the mantle. “I don’t much bother with it these days. Doesn’t impress anyone.”

“You were an actor?” Billy asked.

“Yes, in the theater,” Ian nodded, reaching for his teacup. “That’s how I came to live in that old house, in fact. You see those two gentlemen in many of the photos with me? My good friends, Derek and Patrick, and the rest of our troupe. We were in high demand, back in our day. This was in the late sixties, you understand, when we were young and questioning authority and challenging barriers as one does. We became rather known for presenting Shakespeare and other playwrights in more modern ways, which was as panned by our critics as it was encouraged by our admirers. So the fact that we were knighted at all was something of a scandal.”

Billy grinned as he stirred sugar in his coffee. He’d only been an infant in the sixties, though he remembered his parents’ stories about growing up in that era, and knew it was likely the best time of their lives.

“We’d earned quite a lot of money doing our bit, and like all brash young men, we had designs and dreams on it, you know. It was Derek who talked us into buying an old house together—as much time as we spent sodomizing Shakespeare, he adored the grandeur of history, bygone eras, the whole idea of life before our time. That old manor got into all of us, in many ways.”

Billy sipped his coffee. He knew very well that McKellen had given him multiple openings to bring up what this was really about, but he wanted—needed—the old man to bring it up himself. “So you must have been the one to modernize it, then. The kitchen, the bathroom…”

“Some of it, yes,” McKellen nodded, “We’d put a fair amount of work into it. Mostly cleaning it, as no one had lived in it for half a century before we came in. All of that beautiful furniture, the rugs, the wallpaper… it was as if they’d simply walked out the door and left it all behind. And it all needed to be specially cleaned. We’d brought a plumber in to put in a toilet, of course, one modern thing we simply couldn’t do without.”

“Must have been interesting,” Billy grinned, “I knew that wasn’t original.”

“No, there was an outdoor privy, but the bath itself was original to the house,” McKellen nodded, “Which was unique for its time; homes were rarely built with a room dedicated just to bathing in that time, you know. But then, I understand the gentleman who had the house built was very much ahead of his time.”

“He was a doctor, wasn’t he?” Billy asked, “I wouldn’t have thought a doctor would own a property like that at all.”

McKellen’s eyes sparkled at him, “Well, you’ve done some research, it seems.”

Billy shrugged, “I went to the library, found a few old newspapers and deeds, that’s all.”

“And what sort of new homeowner leaves an over-curious plumber alone in a place like that?” McKellen questioned.

“A politician. One who has better things to do, I suppose,” Billy shrugged, “It’s Ian Holm.”

“Ian Holm!” McKellen exclaimed, and then laughed long and hard. “He won’t last a month!”

“I don’t think he lasted a fortnight before he called me in,” Billy nodded, grinning. “I think you should tell me who you were really talking to in the parlor, Mr. McKellen.”

Ian sipped his own tea, still chuckling as he leaned back in his chair and regarded Billy thoughtfully. “And I think you ought to tell me what you’re really doing in that manor, Mr. Boyd. I don’t know of any plumbers who work before the crack of dawn.”

Billy smiled at his tea, shaking his head. “Well, Holm didn’t call me about the plumbing, although that clearly needs some work. He must’ve found my number on the internet. It’s a… hobby. Hunting for ghosts.”

Ian’s eyes searched his features, a myriad of emotions crossing his face. “And Holm expects you to… what? Exorcize the place?” 

Billy shook his head again, with less humor, “He expects me to make whoever is there move on. But I don’t know that I can do that, that’s not usually my intent. Certainly not without understanding what happened between them.”

“Them?” Ian questioned.

“Yes,” Billy nodded, “There’s more than one entity there. I didn’t know it until just last night, but it makes much more sense now. One is friendly and the other is…”

“Decidedly not.” Ian finished, “What else do you think you know?”

“That a young man was murdered there,” Billy said and the old man brought his folded hands to his mouth, “I found a old newspaper story. Part of one, anyway. The doctor’s son. His name was Dominic,” Billy paused, watching the old man, “I think you already know that. I think maybe you know him already, maybe better than I do.”

“Yes,” McKellen murmured quietly, stroking his beard as he looked out the window toward the manor. “I knew him. Not personally, of course, but… he made himself known to me, with time. That was the most difficult part about leaving that place. It was like… leaving behind an old friend.”

“Why did you leave?” Billy asked.

Ian brought his eyes back to Billy’s face. “I think the more pertinent question, Mr. Boyd, is ‘why did we stay?’

“When we first came to that old house, we felt like explorers,” McKellen started, “There were old papers, documents left in desks, letters, notes. It was a window into another time.

“After a few weeks, some of the novelty wore off, at least for Patrick and I. We went about our lives and settled in. But Derek… the more he discovered, the more intrigued he became. And that was when it all began.”

Ian tented his fingers, “We thought nothing of it at first. One would switch on a light, only to have it switch off as soon as you’d turn your back. The electricity would hum. We had a man out to be certain the circuits weren’t faulty.

“It was when we had been there for a couple of months that it became very clear, we were not the only ones there. None of us were particularly religious, you understand, so we found it something of a novelty, living in a haunted house, with a ghost who seemed for the most part good-hearted, a bit of a cheeky fellow. Doors would open and shut. One would see a shadow out of the corner of one’s eye, there one moment and gone the next. Cold drafts would blow with no open windows. The lights… he loved to play with those lights.”

Billy grinned and nodded, “I wonder what he must have thought when it was first wired in.”

Ian chuckled, “He certainly enjoyed it. From what I understand that was the first home in Little Stratford to have electricity. It was put in around 1900 by a gentleman who did not stay long afterward. That was why I went up there this morning, you know, it’s been decades since the power has been switched on up there. I thought Dominic was having quite a bit of fun.”

“Maybe a bit,” Billy smiled, “He’s certainly vocal through them.”

“Mm, he is that,” Ian agreed. “But I’ve gone off my point. Where was I?”

“Your friend,” Billy urged. “He found out more about the murder?”

“Ah, yes.” Ian paused in thought before he went on, “Derek discovered a stain on the floor of his bedroom. The first bedroom on the right. You might have thought the cleaners would have said something, but perhaps it was faded enough, or they simply didn’t think much of it since it was deep in the hardwood itself, but it’s quite obvious. You can see a void in it, the outline of a man’s shoulders, and then a large pool. It was clearly a violent death,” Ian’s voice dropped to a foreboding tone, “Derek searched the library, as you had, and found out about the murder, and things took a turn. The door to that bedroom would slam in his face, the doorknob would burn. If he did sleep in there, he would be tormented with nightmares. He claimed the ghost would pound on the walls and scratch at the windows. Though neither Patrick or I ever heard this. Eventually Derek and I switched bedrooms.”

“So, Dominic’s bedroom became yours,” Billy grasped, and Ian nodded, “Eventually, Derek maintained that he was completely unable to even walk passed Dominic’s door to the rest of the second floor without being attacked. He even showed us scratches that he couldn’t explain, on his arms and back,” Billy’s stomach dropped at that, the very same thing he had been experiencing. Ian folded his hands before his mouth again in thought, “He had to make a bed in the music room, and even in there, he rarely slept. It took a horrible toll on him.

“I tried to reason with Derek, tell him otherwise, but he wouldn’t hear it. He believed quite firmly that Dominic had a personal vendetta against him for uncovering his murder. So, in a last effort, he decided to make up a bedroom in the coach house.”

“Oh no,” Billy breathed.

“He spent one half of a night there, and then fled in absolute terror,” Ian confirmed, sitting back. “We never could get him to come back to the manor, or even tell us what had happened. Truthfully, he began to avoid contact with us at all.

“I could not understand it,” Ian glanced at his hands. “In all my time living in the house, Dominic seemed to me… such a kind, gentle soul. If I was ill, there were times when I felt… almost tended, by him. Which all makes sense, given his…” Ian broke off this thought, looking lost in thought. “But of course, if there is another… and it is who I think…”

Ian did not continue that sentence. With a shake of his head, he changed tact, “After another two years, our troupe broke apart, and our demand in the theater began to dwindle with our savings. Patrick and I reluctantly had to part ways with the old house. Selling it was nearly impossible. It was eventually bought at a very low price by a historical society that quickly went bankrupt, and so the house languished once again in uncertain, perhaps forgotten ownership. We lost quite a lot of our remaining money in that.” Ian sighed, “Years and distance take their toll. I haven’t seen or spoken to Derek or Patrick for many years now.”

They sat quietly for some minutes, tea forgotten as Ian, lost in his memories, gazed back at the manor house through the window. Billy considered everything that had happened to him, and how he had also thought that Dom was responsible for the malevolence before Cate had set him right. He could easily see how someone would never know about the other ghost.

“I can’t go upstairs,” Billy confessed, bringing Ian back to him. “I’ve never been able to. I can go into the bathroom and as far as Dom’s door, but not beyond that. It’s the same as your friend, only it’s been right from the beginning. I only ever got in Dom’s room once, after…” he paused, “After I went in the coach house.”

“He… the other one,” he headed off Ian’s imminent question, “He did something. It was like he… he pulled me into another time.” He shook his head, as he briefly described what he’d seen, and how he’d blacked out afterward. “I was ill when I woke. Shaky, lightheaded. I barely made it back to the house, and I had help,” he glanced back at the old man.

“Dom brought me in his bedroom. Let me sleep in his bed, tended me, I suppose. And after I woke again, we had a conversation with his lights.” Ian was smiling tenderly and nodding, fully understanding what he meant in a way only someone who had experienced the same thing would. “But after I left that room, the other one attacked me, and I haven’t been able to go near that door since.” He showed his palm, red and angry where the doorknob had burned him only last night.

Ian’s brows pinched in the middle, “Perhaps he gathered why you were there. This other ghost, if there is one. That you arrived to uncover things he doesn’t want exposed, like Derek did.”

“You know something,” Billy concluded, trying not to sound accusing. “You know what this is all about, don’t you?”

Ian gripped his cane and slowly stood with a wince, limping to the bookshelves and scanning their contents. “I wouldn’t say that. I do not know how or why a young man was murdered in that house. I do not know by whom. And as to who the other spirit might be…” he looked pointedly at Billy, “I have only a theory, and forgive me, but I will keep it to myself. Purely selfish, you know, but I live so close to that old manor house, that if a ghost comes calling at my door in the night, I would much rather it be a very dear friend.”

Billy smiled at that, “Did you ever see him? Dominic? Did he ever take form for you?”

The old man paused in his search to shut his eyes, remembering, “Yes. Just once. He was a young man, with a jaunty sort of face. Bright eyes. Quite lovely eyes.” Ian broke from this reverie, continuing to scan the shelves before he moved on to piles of hatboxes and trunks of old papers in the corner of the room, “It did not last long—seconds—and he seemed quite surprised. I believe he may not have done that before. Fried a nearby lamp, in fact.”

Billy smiled, thinking of how much Dom had struggled in the two brief times he’d witnessed this.

“Ah,” Ian exclaimed, finally coming up with an old book, bound with soft leather. He cradled it in his gnarled hands like something sacred, “This was found behind a panel in the wall by the plumber, when he was accessing the piping. The wall between my bedroom and the bathroom, you know. Dominic’s bedroom. Derek had it for some time before he revealed it to me. I should not have taken it when I left. Selfish of me,” He gazed sadly at it before handing it to Billy. “Take it back up there with you. It will tell you much of what you don’t know.”

Ian eased painfully back into his armchair, rubbing again at his knee. “There is a cast of characters to every story, Mr. Boyd. Each one plays a vital part.”

Billy recognized the old man’s fatigue and stood to leave, clutching the book. “Which play is it, then?” he asked with a small smile. “King Lear? Hamlet? Macbeth?”

Ian chuckled, his eyes twinkling. “You’ll have to discover that for yourself.”


	10. Chapter 10

Billy’s feet took him halfway back up the hill with the book McKellen had given him tucked under an arm before he stopped to catch his breath, and his curiosity about it won out.

It was quite plain, the leather flat and smooth except for some decorative tooling at the corners, soft bound and somewhat dried out, cracking slightly along the spine. The pages were quite yellow and brittle at the edges. This book was very old. He opened it carefully to a random page, seeing a fine handwritten script, the ink oxidized to brown, his eyes lighting on the words that jumped out: _C Ward, Father, Vikings, Billy._

He quickly shut the book, an exhale leaving him as his eyes skittered around at the looming manor and the edge of the wood, feeling like a child sneaking peeks at things he ought not see. This was obviously a journal, probably Dom’s, and with his own name written on the pages in it. His thoughts flew back to just days ago, introducing himself— _I’m Billy, by the way. It’s William, really, but Billy’s what I go by_ —and Dom’s spoken voice, just yesterday in his bedroom— _Billy, don’t go!_

It shouldn’t be so surprising. It’s not as if it was an uncommon name in this country in the last several centuries; why wouldn’t Dominic have known someone who was also named William? Maybe Dom’s voice wasn’t addressing him at all. Maybe it was addressing someone else entirely, a Billy he’d known from his own time. Maybe it was all residual, something that repeated over and over, just like the sound of his own mother’s voice, uselessly telling him the kettle was on. Maybe he was completely daft for assuming he’d forged some connection with this ghost at all.

At the edge of the woody outcrop, there was something that didn’t quite belong in the natural landscape, a straight edge. Tucking the book back under his arm, he strode over to come upon a low wall of brick, almost buried by vines and other vegetation. He followed it up part of the hill and around until he could see all of what was still visible, the foundation of some building, perhaps another, smaller house on the property. He looked up toward the manor and then back down to the village. He had followed McKellen down the hill along a more level, southerly course, clearly easier for an old man with a bum knee, so he’d not seen this before. 

He knelt, looking closer at it. These bricks were the old Chatsworth type, just like those of the manor itself. But as he brushed away dead leaves, he saw that they were charred and crumbling apart with a mere touch. The foundation and the scattered remains of fireplaces and chimneys were all the remained, but this building must have burned to the ground, a fire that would have been quite hot to crack the very brick. He stood back up, skirting around it, noting the way the ground itself was swallowing up some parts with the natural erosion of the hill, how the ivy and bushes had grown up around and inside it. It must have burned years ago, even decades. Still, if it was built of the same sort of material, it ought to be of the same time period as the manor, not later, and possibly not even before.

A hiss sounded to his right from the wood, his head whipping toward it but seeing nothing. He glancing about, looking for a stray cat from the village, but in his heart he knew it was no animal that made that sound. He’d heard it before, inside the manor house.

“Is that so,” he muttered, “Maybe I’ll come back here, then, have a chat with just you.” He gestured to the ruins before him with the book in his hand, “Maybe you can tell me what happened here.” 

The wind whipped up hard and fast, tearing the book right from his hand and tossing it to the ground, blowing the pages violently. Billy pounced, but he was too late, and a couple of the brittle pages had torn free, flying up into the air.

“Shite,” he growled, glancing around angrily and then back to the pages, now blowing far out of his reach across the valley. “You’re a piece of work, you know that? Whoever you are.” He clutched the book protectively to his chest, “I suppose I’m going to find out, eh? Whether you like it or not.”

He looked after the torn pages again, now mere specks tumbling in an overcast sky, and turned to climb the rest of the way back to the manor.

After wrestling the door open, Billy strode inside, finding the house quiet. His eyes fell to his cameras, set up the first night and forgotten, long out of time and batteries, along with his dead mobile. He breathed a laugh. How completely useless they’d been. Hesitant to set the book down, he gathered them up one by one, tucking them back into their cases in the parlor, along with the pile of research, and plugged in the phone to recharge.

Sitting in the parlor armchair, he held the book in his lap, thinking of what the old man had told him. _It will tell you much of what you don’t know._

It might do, at least about Dominic’s life here a century ago, but what about all the questions Ian didn’t have answers to? Why couldn’t Billy access the rest of the second floor? Why had Ian been able to live here for years without being attacked by this other ghost, yet one of his friends had been completely tormented? Why was Billy its latest target?

Despite how quiet the house was, the feeling had definitely changed from the despondent ignorance he’d gotten all night. He was being closely watched, and if what had happened at the burned ruins was any indication, there were things within this book that someone did not want him to know. Plus he had his own morality to contend with. As a boy, he’d once been caught reading Maggie’s diary and caught hell for that, both from her and from his parents. Rather than finding out his sister’s deepest secrets and being able to blackmail her with them as an annoying little brother, he’d received a lesson about privacy and respect from his father that had taught him the meaning of shame.

Instead of setting to it, he left the parlor and heading to the stairs, as much as he knew he was tempting fate.

At Dom’s door the oppressive air rushed in, but he ignored it, clutching fast to the book in his hand. He doubted that Dom would respond to him, as he'd been all night long, but he had to try. Lifting his free hand, he hesitated and then knocked softly at the door.

“Dominic? Dom,” He started, “Your mate Ian, who was here this morning… I had tea with him. He told me he knew you.”

He paused, listening hopefully, but there was nothing, no humming of the lights, no sounds, only that heavy, thick, anxious air. “I… I know you’re angry with me. I wouldn’t have left your room, then, if I’d known… You tried to tell me, and I didn’t understand you. But I do now. I know what you meant.”

He waited, still getting no response. He lifted the book in his hand. “Your mate Ian gave me this. I think it’s yours, your journal. I haven’t read it. If it’s private, I understand.”

It was building in the air, the same foreboding rage he now knew came before the other bastard did something violent. “Dominic, he doesn’t want me to.” He called, more urgently, “He ripped out pages and I tried to get them but I couldn’t, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Suddenly there was a click from the doorknob, the door opening, and even as it nearly slammed back in his face, Billy shoved his arm with the book inside, the heavy door hitting him hard as he squeezed through. He fell to the floor as it slammed, turning over to his back to look as the other pounded and kicked at it from the other side, and the loud scream that seemed to be inside his head howling. The lights switched on, building to fiery bright and humming so loudly that the sharp bite of frying electricity singing his nostrils. The pounding died down and eventually stopped altogether, leaving the house quiet once again.

Billy got to his feet, dusting himself off, feeling triumphant and pleased as he looked around the familiarity of Dominic’s bedroom as the light eased back down to normal, its cool blues and dark hardwood having none of that oppressive feeling as did the rest of the house. Being in here once again gave Billy a sense of security, even with clear image he still had of Dominic lying where the rug did now, covering up the stain of his blood draining away. Yes, Dom had responded to him in here. It couldn’t just be residual.

“Ian called you a gentle soul, you know?” Billy spoke, his voice quiet. “Kind. And cheeky. I think he's very fond of you.”

He glanced around, seeing nothing but knowing Dom was there. He held up the book. “He gave me this. He said he and his mates found it in here.” He turned, studying the walls with the floorplan in mind and went toward the walnut panel in one corner. He set the book on the floor and slid his finger along the seams, finding it loose. Pushing it up and then prying it back gave him access to the bathroom plumbing and a cobweb filled space where this book could easily have been hidden. “It’s a good hiding place, yeah? Wouldn't have been found at all if they hadn't put that toilet in.”

He picked up the book again, looking at it. “Ian asked me to bring it back to you. I’m sure he only took it because it gave him a sort of… connection, you know? He considered you a friend. Like I do.”

Billy came around to the desk, brushing over its well worn surface, blotted with brown spots of dripped ink. Dom must have written much of this journal sitting right here at this desk. It's very wood seemed to radiate the past.

“Thank you for letting me in here again, Dom,” He turned, cradling the book in his hands. “Listen, if you don’t want me to read this, I’ll put it back behind that panel where it belongs. But that’s no guarantee someone else won’t come along later on and find it.

“I’d like to read it though,” He confessed, “I want to know you better and I think this book can help me to help you. Would that be alright, Dom? Can I read your journal?”

He watched the wall sconces hopefully as the moment stretched in the quiet. Then they brightened, and flickered, _Yes._

Billy exhaled the shaky breath he’d been holding, surprised by how emotionally invested he felt. “Thank you, Dominic.”

Crossing to the bed, he climbed up on it, at once remembering its comfort and warmth. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment as he settled back into the pillows, and opened the book to the first page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite the date of my last update, this fic is not abandoned. I had a hard drive failure in 2012 and lost a huge amount of new material on a lot of my WIPs, including this one, and I have a lot of rewriting to do. I will come back to it, please have patience.


End file.
